


To Whoever Decided the Value of Pearls

by fairmanor



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: 1950s AU, Alternate Universe - Historical, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Baseball, Dancing, Fluff, Gen, Happy Ending, Korean War, M/M, Marine Patrick, POV David Rose, POV Patrick Brewer, Rural 50s Town Life, Slow Burn, Smut, Town Parties, period au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:54:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 39,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25710928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairmanor/pseuds/fairmanor
Summary: ‘I hate to be a downer, son, but we’re all going to die.’David had looked at his shoes, then, and wondered if someone else would be wearing them one day. He dearly hoped not, for he’d had them tailor-made in London. They were a stunning pair of Mayfair Oxfords, buffed and nailed to perfection to the contours of his heels and toes, the finest Ukrainian leather making them shine hard and proud like two black beetles. No one else but him had stood for ninety minutes in Crispins as the shoemaker took his measurements and then took them again. It would be an insult to his work – and, come to think of it, the next owner’s feet.*The year is 1952. The Second World War is over, and a new one has slotted into its place. Three years ago, the Roses were duped by their business partner who joined the throng of people deciding they want more out of life after the war and were ready to grab it by the throat. But when they're plunged headfirst into the up-and-coming town of Schitt's Creek, the Roses no longer have that choice. In a continent newly fixated on the American Dream, how will David Rose decide to carve out his portion of the promised land? And what's an exiled, moody Marine got to do with it all?
Relationships: Alexis Rose & David Rose, Johnny Rose/Moira Rose, Patrick Brewer/David Rose, Stevie Budd & David Rose, Theodore "Ted" Mullens/Alexis Rose
Comments: 52
Kudos: 52





	1. Canada the Beautiful

**Author's Note:**

> \- This story has burst out of me over the past couple of days, and I'm not entirely sure where from. I've always wanted to write a period AU, so I'm very, very excited to share it with you.
> 
> \- Hopefully, I'll be updating once a week!
> 
> \- I've taken generous liberties with the dates that songs were released because:  
> a) I'm the worst history student in the world  
> b) some 50s songs were just too beautiful and relevant to not include in certain scenes.
> 
> \- Many, many grateful thanks to my incredible betas and friends [ dawns_early_light](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawns_early_light/pseuds/) and [ justwaiting23](https://archiveofourown.org/users/justwaiting23/), who have kept (and will continue to keep) me in well-needed check. You are both stars!
> 
> \- Here is the link to the playlist I've made for this fic, to listen as you read (if you like): [Pearls](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7nuz23X1JAAWVhXHrjcpzF?si=RSigT9FERguxyMUVbLVKXg)

“I have to say that although it broke my heart, I was, and still am, glad I was there.” – Markus Zusak

* * *

_1949_

“I hate to be a downer, son, but we’re all going to die.”

David had looked at his shoes, then, and wondered if someone else would be wearing them one day. He dearly hoped not, for he had had them tailor-made in London. They were a stunning pair of Mayfair Oxfords, buffed and nailed to perfection to the contours of his heels and toes, the finest Ukrainian leather making them shine hard and proud like two black beetles. At his personal request, he’d had the smallest of pearls studded into the raised heels, not protruding so much as to throw his gait off balance but just enough to know they were there. No one else but him had stood for ninety minutes in Crispin’s as the shoemaker took his measurements and then took them again. It would be an insult to his work – and, come to think of it, the next owner’s feet.

He wondered if that had happened with all the other shoes they had left behind. Perhaps some foppish businessman was trying to stuff his bones into David’s things like one of Cinderella’s stepsisters. They weren’t dead yet, not quite, but David and Johnny Rose both knew that many of their luxury custom belongings had been bagged up and exchanged for something fat and green. They blamed Eli out of technicality – out of the reason that he was the one who’d done it to them – but neither of them _blamed_ Eli, per se. It was the thing to do. It was the way of the day. He had seen something that could be his and he’d taken it, and all people could think of was seizing the moment and young men on battlefields, scraping their way through the decade that had rocked the earth. It had taken Eli four years to muster up the courage and means to do it. David would have found it brave if it weren’t so fucking cowardly.

 _We’re all going to die._ It may have been the tail end of a conversation that David and Johnny had been having on the way to the ends of the earth into which they were being chauffeured, but those were the first words that David had heard when he’d stepped onto the soil and dust of Schitt’s Creek, Ontario, The New World, No Ifs or Buts. Surely that had to mean something.

There had been little more to occupy the senses in the past six hours than the low, wounded animal keening of his mother, the forceful press of his sister’s knee against his as she fought for the majority of the space, and his father’s steady stream of reassurances and optimistic cliches that David knew were born from fear and his own loss of grip on reality rather than any earnest effort to offer ministration to the delicate sensibilities of his family. When David closed his eyes, the weight of the air in the car pressed down over his eyelids, making him feel fuzzy and light headed. His head was filled with a pale, translucently colored something that was made up of nothing at all, and when he tried to concentrate all that came to mind was the last smell he had caught of the mahogany banister in their Toronto mansion or the nervous shuffle of contracts in their lawyer’s hands. He couldn’t think. He simply couldn’t think.

It wasn’t lost on David, either, that that was probably the last time he would ever be chauffeured anywhere, unless he was being escorted away from his wedding venue – unlikely – or trolleyed down a hospital corridor to subsist for the rest of his days in an iron lung. More likely. And, at this point, preferable.

 _We’re all going to die._ It was a small sentence that would stick with David for a long time; he knew that as soon as it had been said. David knew his father was a good man. His loyalty, hard-earned yet hard-lost, melted easily into a bumbling charm and light silliness that his rough lot in life had not yet stolen away from him. He meant little, if anything at all, by the phrase. It was just another of his introspective, albeit uncomfortably blunt, adages about the future. If mortality were the case, then David decided then and there that he wouldn’t spend another second of his life giving anyone who didn’t deserve it the satisfaction of seeing him weakened, quiet, broken. He had just pushed his heels into the felt and wood of the car floor and its mat, rocking back on the pearls as he often did, rooting himself in the last vestiges of luxury he had.

David pursed his lips. The car door crunched shut behind them. The wheels struggled to make tracks in the dry ridges of the road for a moment before shooting off like a cartoon automobile launching itself off a cliff. Once the shock had subsided, David finally found it within himself to respond to his father.

“Even if it’s _here?”_

* * *

_1952_

“David, can you remind me what you’re actually doing tomorrow?”

“Hm? I told you this morning, why would you possibly need reminding?”

“Because I didn’t care this morning. Did you even _hear_ the reports? Coco Chanel has apparently helped to pay for some Nazi officer’s funeral.”

There was a familiar dull thump on the closed door that sounded like Johnny’s walking stick.

“Don’t, Alexis.”

David looked up from the brand-new copy of _Harper’s Bazaar_ that had somehow found its way into the flavorless motel reception that morning. “Dad’s right, don’t talk about things like that.”

“I won’t, just tell me what you’re up to!”

David raised an eyebrow. “You should be able to remember. And I’m going to sit here and keep reading until you do.”

“What are you readi– David, that’s my magazine! It’s a _girl’s_ magazine.”

Alexis pounced out of her seat and bounded across the room to grapple for the glossy pages that David was holding high above his head as he rolled across the other side of his bed.

“Does it say so on the front? No. There’s a very beautiful woman on the front, so if anything _I_ should be more enticed to read this than you,” David retorted.

Alexis whined petulantly, hiking up her flouncy underskirt to follow David over the bedspread and onto the flattened carpet floor.

“David, you’re such a little –”

“Ugh, _stop!”_

It was, for all the insults and inevitable scratches that Alexis would drag across David’s face with her long nails, a normal night. Johnny would only ever put his leg to the trouble of checking they were okay when things were completely silent in the adjacent room. Moira, however, was less inclined to tolerate the sound of anyone who wasn’t her husband. As David and Alexis continued to wrestle on the floor, she flung the door open and stalked in.

“I beg you, have some consideration for your poor mother’s delicate head!” she wailed, making more noise than the two of them combined. “Is there any necessity to act like such gingersnaps and rascals at every utterance the other makes?”

David lifted his head. He relinquished his grip on his sister, who now had the magazine clenched between her teeth. A clever move. They would both rather bury the hatchet than risk ripping the thing.

Moira tutted as she moved further into the room, seating herself where Alexis had been. “Really. To think I ever raised such rogues,” she said. There was no bite in it.

David crinkled his brow and pretended to consider that as he stood up, brushing off his white sweater vest. “Hm…would we say raised?”

Moira said nothing. It was a self-deprecating agreement.

“I overheard the few words that provoked your rough-and-tumble, and am now _utterly_ invested,” she said. False, perhaps, but David could hardly villainise her for trying. Moira often forced herself into her children’s lives as something of penance for years of neglect. “I, too, want to know what new venture David is dipping his toes into tomorrow. And Alexis, darling, Jocelyn tells me she would like to see you before class tomorrow. Apparently, there’s an unavoidable issue with some forged handwriting on your latest assignment.”

Alexis immediately blanched, then her mouth dropped open in realization.

“I _told_ him not to change anything!” Alexis growled, scrambling up to confront Johnny in the next room.

The slam of the door muffled her griping, and David was left alone with his mother.

He looked anywhere but at her, taking in the surroundings into which she blended like oil did water: badly, but irreversibly. The short stools that accompanied the metal-rimmed table were upholstered with a thick leather the color of burnt umber. There were gashes in the tight material’s skin that nipped the soft inner flesh of David’s thighs when he sat down on one after a shower and was wearing nothing but a towel. Beneath the splits, an ugly, yellow, spongy stuff peeked through. The walls were blooming with stains so large that they were only distinguishable from the wallpaper at the very base of the ceiling, a place from which David’s gaze was often averted due to the clusters of mold spores and the spindly, long-legged spiders that floated like cotton and treaded so lightly that David only noticed them when they were crawling across his feet in the middle of the night. And he had borne witness himself to the most recent destruction of the carpet, when Stevie had tried to drag her cordless Eubank over the balding fabric and ripped a mighty hole right at the base of the dresser.

To David’s surprise, his mother was the least likely out of the lot of them these days to make any kind of disparaging comment about the state of the rooms. She had let herself sink into it like quicksand. She was unbothered even now, sipping on the weak cup of tea she had brought with her into the room and crossing and uncrossing her legs on the squat, uncomfortable stool.

“Well, don’t leave me hanging, David,” she prompted. “What news?”

David flapped a hand. “It’s nothing new. I’m just…deciding to take Dad’s advice and make something out of this place.”

“Ah!” Moira made an appreciative little noise, one that alluded more to excitement at the prospect of affording a ticket out of Schitt’s Creek rather than any excitement at David’s new business idea. “Your father always was convinced that these growing towns are the future. I hope to God he’s right. What exactly is it you’ll be doing tomorrow?”

“I have a meeting with a Mr. Butani. Apparently, he’s some accomplished businessman who moved here in ’46. He’s going to help me turn the lots I’ve bought into real businesses.”

Moira spluttered on her drink at that. “Pardon me, David? Did you say lots plural?”

David rolled his eyes at the impending stream of doubt that would most likely dent the fragile notches of his self-faith.

“Yes, Mother, lots plural,” he said firmly. ‘And before you ask, I haven’t decided what I’m going to –’

“Well, have you decided what you’re going to do with them?” Moira said, regaining control over her milky tea and draining it in a gulp.

David thought back to the conversations he’d had with Stevie about the lots last week, and how he _had_ actually come up with a bit of an idea. Then he looked at his mother’s face, ever pointed and alert and ready to burst. There were only several possible days on which David thought be might be able to handle his mother’s squawking for an entire twenty-four hours. He called those days Christmases and Doomsday. And today, for reference, was 7th January. 353 days until the holidays and nowhere near enough to the end of the world.

“Ugh. Ask me again this time tomorrow.”

* * *

_1951; New Year’s Eve_

There were far less minutes to midnight than David would have liked. He was being deliberately stubborn with his timings, making sure to stay outside in the stinging winter wind for a moment too long rather than join in with a chorus of Auld Lang Syne on Roland’s rickety, untuned piano. David lit another cigarette and savored it in slower pulls, like he was sipping a second cup of coffee after downing the first in haste.

The grandfather clock in Roland’s living room chimed its twelfth chime. At the top of every hour, it always sounded like that was the last one it would croak out before shutting up shop for good. Warm, muffled cheers penetrated through the glass and shuttered wood of the house to where David was leaning against the wall on the veranda.

_“Should auld acquaintance be forgot,_

_And never brought to mind?”_

David scrunched his nose and sniffed. “Probably,” he muttered to the new year.

David glanced sidelong into the living room, carding through the masses of townspeople until he could find his parents. Jocelyn was by their side, a frilly apron tied over her polka-dot smock, pressuring them to take a slice of her yet-untouched orange delight pie. His father smiled warmly at her, which in his book of facial expressions meant a resounding ‘no’.

It filled David with a bitterness like the coppery taste of blood. He could still hear the ripples of his mother’s innocent, blasé voice like he’d heard the blast of an airborne miles across the water one night in 1944.

 _And who do you think bought all your patrons?_ She barely even looked at him as she said it. She’d been toying with Jocelyn’s ham and pineapple bake, spearing the fatty meat and watching it slop back into the tinned juices pooling on the floral china. David could hardly blame her. It was inedible.

So, there it was. The entirety of his artistic career had been propped up by North America’s largest and most modern communications corporation, just like everything else in his life. No wonder Maud May Oakes and Stanley Hayter stopped responding to his letters. They had never actually talked to him in the first place.

“1952. What about it, huh?”

David looked up from his cigarette. He saw, with a clench of panic only just small enough to prevent him throwing a cursory glance towards the window, Jake standing there, rolling his own tab between his long, clever fingers.

“Jake? What are you doing out here, someone might –”

And Jake actually laughed, the sheer _audacity_ of it, as though he’d never had a bad word said to him in his life.

“Hold your horses, David, I’m not going to try anything. I was just coming for the company.”

David gave a mirthless snort. “Uh-huh, you seem to be _coming for the company_ an awful lot these days. I know you’ve got something steady going with Stevie as well.”

Unfazed, Jake stuck his cigarette between his lips and grazed a match along the wall. It sizzled and spat then flared up liberally, sparks glowing orange in the black, fighting hard against the December – no, January – gale. David shivered and wrapped an arm around his middle. Thin white cotton and buttery leather were no match for whatever Canadian hell was about to dump itself atop the small town in the next eight weeks. David had paid twenty dollars for a jacket that didn’t even keep out the cold. He wondered why.

“There are a few things I am, David, but steady is not one of them.”

David prickled at the admission. There was a moment, perhaps a month ago or two, where he believed that there was something in Jake that would keep him grounded, a grain of dependability in a sea of dust and poverty and family arguments. But that grain had washed up and lain limp on the shore for a couple of months now, nothing but fool’s gold and grit. Yet again.

He looked at Jake again. Jake was very handsome. He’d taken David by surprise with his fluidity. When David had first seen him, all plaid lumberjack’s shirt tucked into a robust pair of denim work trousers, he’d assumed he had a sweet high school Dorothy and five or six Timmy’s and Mary Sue’s at home. But then he’d led David outside of Mutt Schitt’s barnyard jamboree in the middle of some girl’s warbling rendition of _Blue Moon of Kentucky_ and kissed him, slow and wet and deep, as though men could walk around doing things like that. And David had kissed him back like he was in the warm, velvet underbelly of Rome again, where he’d had his first kiss with a man in an underground osteria at sixteen and forgotten how to speak English for a few hours.

“Well, maybe I don’t want your company anymore,” David said. He had hoped it would land with more bite. But Jake, ever the Jake he was, barely even blinked.

“Shame,” he shrugged, letting the thick smoke curl slowly from his lips before discarding his cigarette and tramping it into Roland’s veranda. ‘You’re a pretty guy, David. Don’t let it go to waste, you hear me?”

And then he stalked off, away from the party altogether rather than back inside. He probably had some clandestine meeting or four set up to tide him over into the new year.

David and Stevie had decided to revive themselves the next morning in Twyla’s Diner. As visually offensive as the chequered linoleum and dated posters of 1930s starlets were, it was the perfect place to see off the last of a hangover. The eggs were sloppy, but they were good, and the permeating scent of coffee that clung to every surface had almost the caffeine content of a real cup.

“Gee, David, I don’t know what to say,” Stevie admitted. Having reached the end of his tirade, David was shovelling self pitying heaps of toast and sausage into his mouth until his cheeks bulged. “It’s not really my place to comment, but it sounds like your parents shouldn’t have been stuck up in your shit at that age.”

“Is that a dig at my parents snaking round me like vipers or at my own helplessness?”

Stevie took a long sip of her banana milkshake to delay her answer. It was only after she had popped the cherry into her mouth, sucked the flesh off the stone and deposited the stone in a napkin that she answered, “I’ll leave that up to your interpretations.”

“They’d better not do it again, I’m serious! The only reason it was brought up was because I let slip that I was planning on doing something with Main Street. Apparently the lot in the middle was some saloon about seventy years ago, but the whole thing has been boarded up ever since the landlord died in that shootout. Look at it this way. It’s only been, what, fifteen years since this place was little more than a census-designated community? It’s outgrown itself now. We need something innovative and practical that serves and benefits vendors _and_ customers without any of the pressures of expanding outside the town. There’s over two thousand people here, and as cute as Mick Godsey’s little general store is, he’s childless and not getting any younger. When he retires, how the hell is anyone – specifically, me – going to come by literally anything of substance here?”

Stevie was staring at him with an unreadable expression. David snapped his fingers in her face.

“Well? I know that was all a bit – ham-fisted, but…what do you think?”

Stevie came back to her senses and laughed incredulously. She was impressed by him. It made David feel warm and fond.

“I think you should put what little money you have where your mouth is and give us a proper fucking Main Street, David Rose.”

* * *

_1952_

David twisted his watch, the time only just visible in the dim black streetlight. He tapped his foot. Stevie knew what time they were meant to be going out. It took them over twenty minutes to walk to The Wobbly Elm, and the place was far too new to favor patrons. If they got there late, there would be a crush at the bar that showed them no mercy.

A clack of wide heels and several labored breaths later, Stevie was barrelling into his side, her hair falling out of the sleek chignon that it seemed to have been falling out of ever since David met her. He had only ever seen Stevie with her hair down on several occasions. Granted, they were occasions that both of them would rather forget, and had managed to put behind them fairly successfully. A wide-collared, wine-colored thing of crepe de chine hugged her shoulders and hips. It was a welcome change from the drab pencil skirt of every day while she was stuck behind the motel desk, a false smile pinned to her face as tightly as the ‘Stephanie’ badge on her breast.

“One look at you and anyone would think you were married and bored with it,” David said.

Stevie scoffed, punching him in the shoulder. “Don’t start spreading that around, you damn scamp. There’s enough people talking each other’s ears off about me as it is, I don’t need you stirring the pot.”

David smirked. While he and Stevie had put their tryst to bed long ago, little did he know that it would only add another cup of red dye to the spinning rumor mill of one Stephanie Budd, the kind of woman who mothers scowled at. It was hard for him to understand sometimes. He came from a place where people loaned themselves for no other reason than they could; people who dripped in dinner jewels one hour, vodka the next and come the one after that. Neither bad nor good, just disoriented with wealth. Where wealth was scarce, however, people were measured in the things they said. David had learned that the hard way, having once offended the local seamstress by accusing her blouses of being the worst thing a woman could be around here: skanky. After three years, he was better versed in the implications and consequences of sticking by Stevie’s side as a friend. It was soothing, though, having someone who felt like an extension of yourself in all their isms and schisms. A dirty look shared was a dirty look halved.

They made it to The Wobbly Elm in the nick of time. There was a wide empty space at the innermost foot of the bar where David supposed a jukebox would someday soon take occupancy. Not soon enough, however, that the bar didn’t feel compelled to hire a rather sad band of boys who looked like they had only surfaced from high school last week. They stood in an awkward squashed pentagon on a slightly raised platform in the corner of the bar, all nasally voices and loose-stringed guitars.

“Place your bets, what do they call themselves?” Stevie said.

David looked at them. He bunched his mouth into his cheek.

“They look like one of those ‘and his’ bands. You can substitute literally anything in there. Hank Thompson and his Brazo Valley Boys. Hank Peters and his Horseriders.”

“Why Hank?”

“It’s always Hank.”

“Hank Hankton and his Honky-Tonk Hankmen,” Stevie offered.

David snorted into his beer, making the foam spittle up his nose. God, Stevie would have loved it in the city. He never thought he’d meet anyone so self aware in a place like this.

New as it might have been, The Wobbly Elm seemed destined to sag back into some future version of this town that was chock full of fatigue and mediocrity. If it looked like this now, David dreaded its next fifty years of existence. A month in and the walls were already brown; nicotine brown, bacon-grease brown. Patches of brown pooled on the ceiling around the brownish-yellow lights like the walls in David’s room. David stared into the table to see if he could see his own reflection like he could in the twice-daily polished marble of the Ritz. The table skulked back at him in sticky splodges of dark brown. _Don’t even fucking think about it, rich boy,_ it was saying. The carpet was brown, dotted with little squares of a slightly lighter brown, if you looked closely. The cars in the park were, as were the clothes of the patrons. David didn’t even have to look anymore to know what he would see. These were brown times.

The boys continued to twang as David and Stevie sipped their brown, brown beer, their voices breaking on every other note. David hoped whatever limp fundraiser for the jukebox that would inevitably be taking place in the next couple of weeks would hurry itself up.

“So you’re still serious about Main Street, then?” Stevie said. “Haven’t changed your mind in a…” Stevie made a point of looking at her watch, which was ridiculous since there was nothing but the hour behind the cheap glass. “Wow, a _week._ This may be one of David Rose’s biggest commitments to date.”

David tipped a finger under Stevie’s upturned beer, causing her to splutter as it coursed down her chin and into the fabric of her dress.

“You shithead, David!” she cried when she’d stopped coughing, causing some of the nearest male patrons to look at her with shock. But she was laughing, and she hadn’t seen them stare.

“Oh no, what are they all gonna say now? The elusive scarlet woman, already cursing in this fine establishment like it’s some uncouth whorehouse,” he said.

Stevie raised her eyebrows as she pressed her handkerchief to her collar. “Oh yeah? Who’s the one that got us into this mess?”

“ _Not_ the one who currently has beer dripping into their cleavage,” David said pointedly. “And to answer your quite frankly rude question, yes. I am still serious about it. My first meeting is actually in twelve hours.”

“They say Mr. Butani’s a goof,” Stevie said unhelpfully. ‘Someone told me to tell you to reject anything he says about closet organization or printed photographs.”

David sneered. “I’ll keep it in mind, thank you so much.”

“But seriously, what are you thinking? I may have mentioned it around my mother when I went to make her dinner the other night, and she suggested a liquor store. Two liquor stores.”

“Perhaps I could. Or…I could incorporate that idea into a selection of others. Stores, I mean. Little booths that each have a different purpose and for different parts of the household. The entire thing will be set _out_ like a house, with kitchenware and toys and things upstairs that aren’t meant to be in the public eye.”

“Like plumber’s friends?” Stevie said.

David frowned at her disapprovingly. “Stephanie Budd, we are in _public._ But yes, that is the general idea.”

“Sounds an awful lot like a department store, David.” Then, since she was so attuned to the genuine crests and falls of David’s expression, she added quickly, “But that’s not a bad thing! I think it’s exactly what this town needs. Honestly, ask anyone. Ask Tywla here.”

Twyla leaned over from the next table and smiled widely at David.

“No need to repeat it, I was already listening. I got hooked last week when you mentioned my great uncle getting shot. I think it’s a wonderful idea, David! It’ll give me something to look at across the road other than boarded up windows, that’s for sure.”

Then Twyla was up and gone, manoeuvring around the tables to volunteer herself as a cleaner as though her shift at the diner never ended. Even when it wasn’t what she called Skatin’ Saturday, where she literally wore rollerblades to give and take orders, she always seemed to glide.

Stevie looked at her watch again. “I should probably be going soon, unless I want the January workday to knock me out cold tomorrow morning.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

Stevie shrugged, draining her beer and making as though to reach for a coat on the back of her chair before realising she hadn’t brought one. She looked at David’s jacket expectantly.

David hooded his lids and glared at her. “Try again, this is Jacques Fath.”

“Well, do you fancy wrapping a bit of Fath round my shoulders and walking me home like a gentleman, then?”

David looked at his own beer, braced himself and knocked it back in one slug. It was wheaty and thin.

“Fine.”

He took one last look at the bar, full like a sick patient crawling with parasites, and led his friend out into the cold, a hand pressed respectfully between her shoulder blades because she was a lady and he wanted people to know it.

****

The next day dawned unfairly brightly. It was one of those deceptive midwinter suns, the kind that slapped your cheek then kissed it better in a flurry of bewildering, blustery wind and suggestive caresses of the sun that reminded one of summer.

David hadn’t slept well that night. Instead of trying, he gave up at around two o’clock, sat and read until the sun came up then went for a walk to the outskirts of town. Schitt’s Creek squatted at the foot of a motor road that ran straight for mile after dusty mile at the end of it, where David knew that after half an hour of straight driving the road would curve away and inexplicably run alongside the Elmdale tramlines for a minute before curling back inwards to run the length of the larger town. A low, rocky outcrop of mountains that jutted like drawers pulled from desks framed the ridges of David’s vision. They were clearer to see in the winter, the browns and greys less obstructed by the dust that plumed up from the parched earth.

It was a small town, but it could be smaller. It could also be a lot bigger. Someone else seemed to think so too, judging by the massive billboard that was stuck into the ground on the opposite side of the town to the welcome sign. It was made of splintered white wood, the same color as the crumpled tin cans scattered at its feet like petals, and declared “JOIN US IN SUMMER ’53 FOR A STURDY, MODERN HOME IN THE HEART OF THE COUNTRYSIDE!”

David’s lip twitched at that. He looked around at the modest borders of Schitt’s Creek. He could just make out the petrol and corrugated iron of Bob’s Automobile Garage from where he stood. He wouldn’t quite call it the _heart_ of the countryside. It was the esophagus, at most. Or perhaps a badly reset rib.

And it wasn’t somewhere David Rose ever expected himself or his family to end up if it wasn’t for a certain business partner chomping down on a tasty capitalist bit. But there were raffle nights at the town hall, he supposed, and auctions and May Days, and there were plenty of other things starting to crawl their way out of the woodwork. They’d seen the diner at its newest when they were rocketed here three years ago, and now The Wobbly Elm. And soon they’d have whatever David was planning on offering, like his father had told him to do. David struggled to hold in his retorts about how Johnny had yet to find _his_ opportunity here.

Thirteen years ago, at the cusp of David’s adulthood, he would have naturally equated opportunity to wealth and sucked the world up like an oyster whether it was available for him or not. But then Germany happened. An occupational habit, it seemed, this century. The country was suddenly nothing like it had promised David in his youth. He had seen the rich, decadent hedonism of it for himself; he had been one of those faceless figures in the night who ate and drank and danced and curled themselves around men and women and all the people who seemed to flutter in between. He was a young boy then. He was sixteen and he was seventeen. He would clamber, and sometimes lie prone, across the European borders in the ribbed backseats of new cars and meet friends on the Orient Express. He would get telegrams and phone calls from his parents that he received in hotels, imploring him to get out of the continent before it ruptured again, just like the news had promised. Europe: that powder keg, that swollen belly, the league of nations ever ready to grow taut and shudder before splattering its guts over the world for the second time in a century. Young men running at other young men, little lives that had been eating chocolate from brown packets one minute and sent spinning and vomiting into the ground the next.

His father had been right, of course. He was always right. David blinked, and Weimar slipped away over a summer. The colored magazines that discussed worldly concerns were full of sharp, angular blacks and deep, soupy reds, plastered over arms that stood frighteningly, endlessly erect at 45° angles. They were full of brownshirts and rallies and questions that hurt his father’s feelings.

“We’re glad to be here, son,” Johnny Rose had said. “We’re on the right side of things.”

Johnny didn’t often like to talk about the war beyond ministrations about how lucky they should feel that they were in this continent and not that one. Johnny had snatched his own life out of the champing jaws of combat long ago. He had been chewed up, but not quite swallowed like the millions of others, by the Great War. It had got a good taste of him before deciding that his leg was enough to suffice the next fifty years or so. He knocked his stick against the wooden prosthetic whenever he wanted to remind someone of something. Often it was about _how fragile our lot in this game is, how God has set us up to never win a thing, by the end of it all._

“Worm food and plant fertilizer, that’s what we are,” was the other kind of thing that Johnny was capable of saying, in a rare cynical moment.

It certainly didn’t feel that way in North America. Here it felt like the start of things, like the burning of heather on the mountaintops to make way for the new. As though Europe’s second war was just hair of the dog to clear up the hangover of the first, and now, _now_ they were allowed to move on.

David stared up at the splintered wooden billboard. The white family painted onto it were softly smiling upwards and leftwards, the father’s thick arms wrapped round his conjugal tribe, as though they could see the space in which the new estate would be. Waiting. Expectant.

David wondered whether he could be one of those people. He wondered if work, real work, would ever rough its way into his bones. He wasn’t sure he could trust the mercy of metal and madness like other men seemed to do, all those welders and riveters and coppersmiths and platemen. They were being good for Lady Liberty, paying their dues day in and day out.

“Why do they act like that?” David had once whispered into the shell of cold air that domed him and Stevie after one of their mistakes. The intimacy had broken long ago, as it often did, and they were yet again laid side-by-side and alone.

Stevie turned her head. “Who?”

“All the men of the town. The working men. They crawl like a mob from one shift to the next, with nothing in between.”

Stevie sniggered at him, and David knew he’d said something rich. Then she trained her amusement down like she was taking a moment to salute the troops. Giving the workers and hard drinkers some credit.

“Well, it is how it is. A day lasts a lifetime and life is a job.”

So work, then. Backbreaking, blue-collared work was how North America would stock up this new, warless nation. David laughed pitifully, the way one would laugh at a newborn deer struggling to stand, when he thought about it. The media was already foaming at the mouth over iron curtains and Koreans and there they were again, back at square one. It was as though America was only allowed to exist on the condition that they were always doing it in defiance of something.

Not this billboard family, apparently. They were comfortable and clean, perpetual grins plastered to their faces as they waited for the estate to be built on the dusty roadside. They were ready to move into homes chock full of modcons and cable televisions. Who was going to build for them? Not David, that was for sure.

He walked on, watching the dust plume at the toes of his black Oxfords. It coated the tips of them white like a soft, virgin snow. Chalk. David wondered if there was a baseball pitch nearby.

His watch read midday. David’s stomach grumbled. Perhaps he would have a moment to stop by the café and grab a sandwich before making his way to Mr. Butani’s. He wondered what he would be like, what kind of experience he had that might help David in his endeavor. From what he had heard, and his name, and what Stevie had said, he was expecting someone friendly, Indian and resourceful. At the worst, he would be nothing more than well-meaning.

David collected a ham and cheese sandwich from the café and tore at the brown paper as he crossed the road to Mr. Butani’s office. He felt more relaxed here. There were no more jibes from his mother or self-doubts standing in the way.

As established, there were many things he was expecting to see when he entered Mr. Butani’s, and this was not one of them.

There was little evidence or rumor to suggest that he would ever take the form of a half-uniformed, headshaven Marine, crumpled and sobbing loudly, raggedly, without control, on the floor amid a sea of scrunched papers.

He hadn’t seen David. David spun on his heel. The sight of him blinked away as quickly as a peek into a wrong room, which is what David now assumed that had been. He wrenched open the office door and threw himself against the other side of it again, convinced he’d just seen something that boy had very much not intended for any human being to see.


	2. Pro Patria Mori

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Again, TW for mentions of war in this chapter, too.

* * *

_Bruges, 1929_

The Langestraat was a broad, calm street that formed the core of the green, blocky Sint-Anna Quarter. If it could move, then it would no doubt web and weave and thunk its substantial territory up and down and through the eastern flank of the city of Bruges like a possessive dragon, leaving a treasure trail of candles and charcuterie in its wake. Not many peaceful nooks and crannies remained in Bruges. It was as real and true a war victim as any British or German man, a chopped-up cornerstone of Flanders to which the healing hope of symbolic poppies hadn’t quite reached. The Langestraat was a reliable refuge, from both the ache of last decade’s conflict and the businessmen who would fan out in hive-like droves every day. It ran like an artery through the city, refined and essential, a soothing lane of dimly lit wine cellars and bakkerijen with limited but delicious options.

David pressed his nose to the window of the nearest. Reflected in the glass, beside him but far in the distance was one of the four ancient windmills that had escaped the war unscathed. To his right, formidable and holy, stood the 15th-century Jerusalem Chapel, an exact replica of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built by a patriarch of the affluent Adornes family.

“I shan’t like anything from here, I know I shan’t,” Alexis declared, stamping her small foot. “There are only two things to eat. Cold flaky pastry or hot flaky pastry.”

David happened to like their pastry. Hard, golden twists of pastry with creamy locks of hazelnut praline; long pastries that looked like spines, dusted with icing and full of almond sugar paste; pastries that melted straight down like cotton candy, so quick and seductive you almost forgot you’d eaten one as soon as it was gone.

The city was like a quiet Christmas to a child like David. Building blocks of chocolate and cobbled walkways were the Red Sea that parted for the Roses as they walked, though it was so empty that there wasn’t really anything standing in the way. David didn’t like the way it felt like this, so…so _sacred,_ so _special_. He didn’t like that they had come here on his birthday, because birthdays were days when irregular things happened. You visited places you never usually visited and took up a lifestyle you couldn’t afford. And even then, freshly ten years old, David knew a city was a place that could drink him up, lurching him here and there on a wave of prospect that he should have probably felt luckier to have. He wanted to stay here until it bored him.

“That’s not why we’re here, son,” Johnny said for the fourth time, a patient but futile attempt to put a stop to David’s grumbling. “I have work to do, and it just so happens that my work coincides with your birthday.”

Of course it did. Johnny’s work coincided with life. It wasn’t to put food on the table anymore; no, those days had long passed. It was to put Moira in emerald velvet and put pastries in David’s belly and put the whole lot of them in an ink-purple Bentley, ripping sideways over the peaking chicanes of the Belgian countryside.

The Roses had a house here in Bruges, the existence of it starting with the green park at the end of the Langestraat. The black iron railings at the edge of the park backed onto generous lengths of garden, squared off and assigned with a municipal precision to each smooth white townhouse, all joined at the hip like the Royal Crescent. The sky, clear and endless and blue, had seen many a kite in the past couple of days, Adelina’s wizened hand wrapped tight and motherly around David’s own as he flew them, tripping and tramping over his sailor boy shoes.

Soon, if Johnny’s meetings went well, that sky would be scored through with thick, crude telephone lines, hanging high in a way that still seemed frighteningly low to David, capable of sizzling his kite to shreds. Telephones confused him. He liked to sit on the stairs of their principal family estate in Toronto and listen to his mother harp down the telephone, chasing dust off the mahogany banister as she waxed lyrical in niceties and falsities. The day before they left for Bruges, he had watched her hang up from a long call with a smile that immediately dropped like a stone into sand.

“That frigid whore,” she said. It was the first time he had ever heard her swear. David wondered if all the phone lines were really worth the trouble.

Moira raised her chin as though she were craning for view over swathes of people, even though there was no one there.

“Alexis, we shall leave the boys to their business and find something more palatable for you,” she said vaguely. “Or Adelina can, I’m sure.”

“Adelina can! Adelina will!” Alexis gripped Moira’s wrist and began to tug her towards the townhouse, as easily as she could for a six-year-old tugging on the wrist of a bejewelled driving force that walked like she could see the entire city at her feet. “She took me for lunch yesterday and we had chicken with rosemary and shallots and artichokes and peas and –”

And they were parted, man with young man and lady with young lady. Johnny offered David a smile and took the back of his head gently, as though he were talking to one of his business partners and not his ten-year-old son who just wanted a pastry and wouldn’t have said no to a peppermint lollipop, either.

“You can come and sit in with me on my meeting today if you like,” Johnny said, as though it was a treat. “Come and see all the things that you’ll be up to one day, just like your old man.”

In the end, David had opted against the meeting, but he could still hear the men behind their palace of wood and reinforced glass. It was the largest office in the building; it was right at the top and determined that people know it. Like most of the structures in Bruges, the building’s purpose hadn’t done away with the rich Baroque interiors of yesteryear. David was glad because it gave him something to look at as he swung his legs on the waiting bench, tongue furred with minty sugar because he really hadn’t shut up about the lollipop.

He took as much of the flattened swirl into his mouth as he could and sucked as he watched the businessmen come and go, and come and go. It was a mesmerising, international blur. Men from Russia and Scotland and Persia and Greece, their briefcases exactly the same, their contents likely different and probably rivalling each other as they grappled for purchase on the peaking corporate ladder. It was July. No one knew yet that October would come, and what it might bring. The markets would groan and split under the weight of these men, and no one would be ready.

As time went by, David began to feel more and more disoriented with what he saw, the men stuttering and dancing like animals in a zoetrope, the decadent blue and gold ceiling swirling in his black eyes. It was a funny feeling, the way one feels when they become strikingly aware of their own existence, and think odd things, like _you are here, right now, and nowhere else._ And _everyone knows you by your name._

What came to David’s mind, opening like a holographic little oyster for the first time, was _you’ll never know these people. They’ll never know you. You may never see a single one again, and you have no idea what’s going on in their lives._

* * *

_1952_

David hadn’t thought about Bruges in twenty four years. It was a memory that had been unfortunately smudged by time and other memories. He hadn’t meant to let it slip out of his grasp, but there was just so much _other_ in his life now that a simple sit down and a peppermint sucker in Belgium really didn’t stand a chance.

But it came to him now. The sight of the businessmen’s faces and the trumpeting cherubs on the ceiling crept back into the foreground of his mind in all their blurring colors. There, he had learned that sometimes there were people in the world you were never meant to know. People you passed and never saw again. Clerks and waitresses and people who gave you directions to the train station, all so forgettable that they were merely a vessel of words. David knew, though he didn’t know how, that the boy that definitely wasn’t Mr. Butani but was writhing on Mr. Butani’s floor, drenched in helpless, private distress, was someone that David definitely wasn’t meant to know. At least not like that. Not in that state.

He’d backed out of the room so fast that he hadn’t even seen his face, just the dog collar and chunky boots. He looked like he had stumbled straight off the Korean shore and into the dingy, backwater office, the office that David knew was makeshift because he also caught a glimpse of a kitchen and a beige chenille sofa through a half open door on the other side of the room.

He looked at his watch. He had only been outside for four – no, three minutes, but it felt like an hour. He watched the moving hand tick round and round, a strange fluttering starting in his belly like he was waiting for the proctor to open the doors of a final school exam. He wasn’t entirely sure why, and the air wasn’t getting any warmer, so he gave himself a shake and re-entered Mr. Butani’s.

His eyes were trained downwards, a slew of apologies and polite words that he had learned in the past three years gathering with the saliva on his tongue, but the boy was gone. The boy and the papers around him were gone, and a man who definitely _was_ Mr. Butani was sat at the desk to the left. It was as though David had opened the door to a witch’s cottage at the wrong time and seen her bent in half over green bubbling liquid in her cauldron, then when he entered again, she had retaken the form of a little old lady baking pies.

That said, a little old lady baking pies was definitely in the cards for one of the future lives of Mr. “Call Me Ray, Please” Butani. He was perched at the desk with the most cheerful look that David had seen in Schitt’s Creek so far on his face, fingers steepled like an expectant merchant. Stevie was right, he was a goof. But he was a goof in all the ways that David felt like could very much come in useful to his business, from the head-to-toe, ill-fitting tweed to his meticulous moustache and kind, crinkled eyes.

“David! David Rose. It’s nice to finally meet you. I took the trouble of filling in all your forms with what information I had. I heard from Theodore who heard from Ivan who heard from Twyla that you were planning on furbishing a store in the Main Street, is that correct?”

David blinked. “I…yes, that’s correct. Only I should probably tune the pegs a bit on your definition of _store,_ because it’s obviously going to be much more than –”

Ray waved a hand, as though someone had already forewarned him that David was – what was it? _Finicky,_ Roland Schitt had said. _An old fuddy-duddy,_ Alexis had said. A whole sea of nicknames that pinpricked and bristled deeper than he let on, an invisible rash that he desperately, desperately wanted to scrub off and prove everyone wrong.

“We don’t have to worry about all of that now, David, all in your own time,” Ray placated. That was certainly a polite way of putting it, even if the town-wide sentiment was there. “Now, have you given any thought to the name of the business?”

That was one way to look at it, David supposed. If the sixty-eight options scrawled on the back of the almost-empty notepad in his motel room were anything to go by, and the other ninety that were sat at the bottom of the wastepaper basket, then yes, he’d given it a little bit of thought.

“Not really,” David said. “I’m oscillating between – two names, at the moment.”

Ray capped his fountain pen. “That’s no trouble at all, David, no trouble at all. And how about the business address?”

“Um. I– Main Street?” David tried pathetically, his faith slipping away from him by the second. “It’s just – I’m living in a, a motel at the moment, which you probably already know, so it would – if I gave you the address to…to another business, then…” David flapped his fingers. “Okay, okay. Just ask the next question.”

“A brief description of the business?” Ray said, insensible of David’s discomfort.

_Sounds an awful lot like a department store, David._

“A – a department store, I guess, but – ugh, pass it here, please.” David easily snatched the form from Ray’s hands, an action that didn’t break his smile. In fact, it seemed to make it even wider.

“Ah, if you already know what you want to write down, I’ll leave it to you, then!” he said, positively beaming now. He stood up and tottered his way into the kitchen. “Stay for a cup of tea, will you?”

Despite the question it had been, Ray had already taken two mugs off the wooden mug tree on the kitchen counter, and that meant that David was staying for tea. Not wanting to be impolite to his new business consultant ( _and_ landlord, David had recently learned), he seated himself down on the old sofa in the living room and looked around. Ray seemed to have renovated this part of the house more recently than his office. It was decked out in a soft, modern floral wallpaper, the coffee table a pastel orange and littered in crosswords and romance novels, as well as broadsheets in English and publications in Gujarati with news for Indo-Canadian citizens.

As David waited for his tea, he shifted in his black wool cardigan, a thin sheen of sweat gathering between the rolls of his stomach in the heat of the electric fireplace. He thought about the instructions he’d received to clean the cardigan only ever in cold washes, and then thought about it shrinking round his wrists and chest as he stared down at the business application form in his hands.

 _Name of the business_ was the one David was struggling with the most. All the best department stores were double-barrelled, the powerhouse combination of two people, usually men, who had bright, feathery things to sell to bright, feathery people. Fortnum & Mason. Abraham & Straus. He perched his hand over the dotted line, clutching Ray’s fancy little fountain pen near its nib. He ghosted the nib over the sheet and watched a drop of ink blotch like a bruise between the small deckles of the paper, right over the word ‘business’. Another drop splodged underneath it, big enough to roll a few inches down the dotted line, leaving it impossible for him to write anything down.

David sighed forcefully, capping the pen and throwing it onto the table away from him. So now his cardigan would shrink and he’d spoiled his form. Barely sparing a thought for the cleanliness standards of the sad yard sale that Ray might have picked this couch up from, David flopped backwards and stared up at the ceiling.

“Is everything alright, David? You look like me after I’ve been caught lying in a poker match,” Ray said. He was stood in the doorway, a steaming cup of tea in each hand.

_Oh yes, everything’s wonderful! I’m just a touch disturbed by the suffering soldier I saw on your floor less than half an hour ago and then vanished into thin air and left me doubting whether I actually saw him at all._

“I’m fine, Ray,” David said. “I suppose starting a business is a little more stressful than I anticipated.”

Ray chuckled. “Oh, you needn’t tell that to me! It’s been three weeks since anyone had let me try and carve love notes into their wedding rings, and the only closet I’ve organized recently is –”

Ray cleared his throat. He looked back into the kitchen for a moment then came into the living room, setting the tea on the table and shutting the door behind him with a distinct _thump_.

“Ah, I see you’ve been looking at this morning’s newspapers,” Ray said, nodding at the coffee table.

David hadn’t been looking at them. But he looked now, tracing a hand over the concentrated ink. The American President’s face was pasted blurrily on the front, a large, square-lettered headline framing the picture:

_TRUMAN: Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war_

“A clever man, their Mr. Truman is,” Ray said jovially. “He never lets up for a second.”

David took a sip of tea. It stung the tip of his tongue, but at least it would keep the cold out for a few more hours. “Mm. Yeah.”

“They won’t be making any more – more calls, for men, do you think?”

“No, no, I don’t think so. Not now. It isn’t the same as last time.”

“Ah.” Ray’s expression was in a rare state of turmoil. He looked like he was desperate to say something, anything, but he was holding it back. He was clutching his teacup hard, and whenever the look passed across his face that meant he wanted to speak he jammed the cup to his lips and sipped noisily.

“I should get going,” David said. He had wanted so badly to speak to Ray about the boy he’d seen on the floor, but he felt like he was intruding on something much bigger than himself and it probably wouldn’t do to make things worse. “Thanks for the tea, Ray.”

And just like that, all the tension melted from Ray’s face and he was his old self again. David found his own observation funny. Ray’s personality was so large that after an hour David was already acquainted with what Ray’s ‘old self’ even was.

“Not at all, David, anytime! You let me know when you’ve finished filling in that form and I’ll get everything sorted for you. See you later!”

As David set down his cup and made to leave, Ray switched on the green, rectangular radio by the side of the armchair he was sitting in. The news crackled through, and President Truman’s voice was there again, just as it had been on the newspaper:

“Carry the battle to them. Don't let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive and don't ever apologize for anything.”

* * *

_Milan, 1939_

“Beauty is a form of genius – is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It makes princes of those who have it.”

“Oscar Wilde,” David said.

Paulina’s fingers tightened around the crook of David’s elbow. She leaned into him a little. David felt the brush of her loosely pinned curls, silken and chocolate brown, against his bare forearm so finely that David had thought it was a drop of rain before he turned to the crown of her head and saw her hair shimmering there like a maroon ocean. He looked at her flawless skin, her dark red pinstriped dress, and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. She was quite simply the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

Sebastien, who was sauntering a few paces in front of them, turned around to glare at David as though he had spoiled something. Paulina scoffed.

“What, you seriously expect us to believe that you made that up on the spot?” she said, laughing light and silvery. She always found Sebastien ridiculous.

Sebastien raised an eyebrow. “I was testing you, of course. I…like to quote the greats and gauge the reaction they procure from a blind audience.”

“Oh, of _course_ you do,” Paulina said. The little squeeze she gave to David’s arm was the single most comforting thing David had felt for a long time. It was a feeling of inclusion, a _come on David, we don’t need this silly man,_ an inside joke to which he had never been privy before. He was always the one that others did not need, but over the course of one sweet Italian summer, this petite, gorgeous gem of a young countess had changed that.

“I’m surprised at you, David. I hadn’t expected you to know something like that,” Sebastien observed, turning back around to raise his camera to the Milan Cathedral. David took one look at it and knew no photograph could do such a thing justice. Simone da Orsenigo was probably turning in his grave at the very thought of a camera trying to immortalize his bastion of marble plates and Ambrosian Rite, as though he hadn’t intended for it to last forever.

Paulina tutted. There was a small kernel of David, perhaps the most desperate one that not even Paulina’s gentle presence could cure, that was pleased to have caught Sebastien off guard for once instead of the other way round.

“I’m thirsty,” Paulina said. “David, let’s stop off at that de- _licious_ little restaurant we visited yesterday. And Sebastien can come too, I suppose.”

David nodded, steering Paulina to the left and towards a sheltered eating area with fold-out white chairs and a vase with a single dahlia in the middle of the table. Sebastien snapped his fingers for a waiter and two chilled buckets of white wine were delivered to the table. While they waited, Sebastien plucked the dahlia from its glass and slowly pulled off the petals, then blew them away. It was a small gesture, pointless and forged only from Sebastien’s boredom, but it made everything awkward all of a sudden. 

And then, nothing was awkward anymore. Nothing was anything anymore. And they had all forgotten about the dahlia.

People always said they could remember exactly where they were when the war was announced. David could still feel the numbing condensation of the wine bottle, could see the pale liquid course around the butt of the glass in a wave before settling and filling it up, slowly and languidly. He remembered the commotion of the indoors section of the restaurant when someone had run inside and started brandishing a fresh newspaper in everyone’s faces, shouting in rapid-fire Italian that made Paulina’s face go white.

“Not again,” she said, and David knew. He knew.

David stopped pouring. Then he met her brown eyes, filmed with regretful tears. There was no way her father would let her leave the country for the next few months, at least. If ever again.

Paulina was not the longest relationship David had ever had, but she had so far been the nicest. The most innocent, too; they hadn’t even touched each other yet, though by now people had usually wrung what they wanted from him from between the pressed white sheets of the Waldorf Astoria and ducked out into the night again. But they both knew it was destined to finish. It was destined to be, in the end, rather like Paulina herself: short and summery and unforgettable.

They stared at each other for a long time, and David almost forgot Sebastien was there, too. He was saying something, something that sounded urgent and humble and uncharacteristic, overall rather unlike his voice, but David wasn’t listening. He pushed a glass towards Paulina hesitantly. She took the stem in her fingers and poured herself a drink. They toasted to what could never be and, while they still had the time and security to do so, they let the day run its course as though there was no war at all.

* * *

_1952_

It was well into the afternoon before David managed to get himself home, kicking at pebbles and gazing through shop windows to try and fill up his thoughts with a bit more substance. God knows what his family would have done with the information if they’d managed to pry it out of him.

Thankfully, David had a judgeless, sardonic refuge at the motel in the shape of Stevie, to whom he could confess serial murder and be confident that she would still sit behind the desk and raise no more than an eyebrow. She was perched there now, spending the afternoon lull in guest check ins with a pack of cards spread out in front of her. It looked like she was playing Solitaire by herself.

“Who died?” Stevie said, without looking up. He wondered if it was his footfall or lack of snippy insults that had given it away.

“No one…yet. I don’t know.” That made David think of soldiers, and all the ones who would be dying today or tomorrow. “There was an…incident. At Ray’s.”

Stevie furrowed her brow. “What kind of incident? Was Mr. Butani not as friendly as they say? He didn’t try and get any money out of you, did he?”

“What? No, no, it wasn’t actually _Ray,_ it was –” David looked from left to right, then gripped the desk and leaned in towards Stevie. That caught her attention. She snapped a card down onto the table and leaned forward, disrupting the pattern of them with her forearms.

“Look, I don’t feel comfortable talking about it here,” he said. “But I’m not really sure what I’ll do if I don’t at least mention it to someone.”

“Come over to mine after my shift and talk about it then,” Stevie said. “We can see what’s on my box and watch for a few hours.”

Stevie hummed on the _m_ of ‘my’, tipping her head and shimmying her shoulders like she was showing off.

“What? What? You have a box? Since when?”

“Since the rest of the inheritance from my great aunt turned out to be exactly the right amount for one and I couldn’t help myself,” Stevie said. “I got sick of borrowing old Mrs. Shelby’s. _I Love Lucy_ will be on, that’s funny. Or there’s something new called _Hockey Night in Canada_ if you fancy it.”

“I think I’d rather chew the television wires,” David said sweetly. “We’ll watch _Your Hit Parade.”_

As was unwritten custom between them, David fiddled with the box – it was a new, expensive model, with more frills and bells on, harder to wrestle with than Mrs. Shelby’s tired old thing – while Stevie hurried back from Twyla’s Diner with a night-time pickup order of fruit pies and custard. She laid out two bottles of wine, a pack of Camel’s, the fruit pies and a box of Twinkies on the carpet by her right hand side as David twiddled the knobs and fussed with the wire. Television sound; the hollow, knocking sound of the plastic, the muted buzz of television static, the gentle stream of nothings that spilled from the box when it was on, it was one of those things that made David feel peaceful in a mundanely human way.

After a couple of slaps David finally managed to get the thing to work, the screen shaking and humming to life with the winking charm of Lyn Murray and the dulcet tones of Dorothy Collins. On a more routine night, David and Stevie may have had several glasses of wine by now and would have been romping around her little bachelorette’s apartment to the music, dancing badly and candidly because no one knew they were doing it except the old man who lived below Stevie. They would dance until he banged his broomstick on the ceiling, bumping them underfoot and making them collapse on the sofa, laughing at the bubble of beauty they’d managed to draw for themselves in this life.

Tonight, however, was not a routine night. No, David was here under condition. Condition that he tell Stevie the story of the Marine he had seen on the floor at Ray Butani’s who had disappeared at the next open of the door as though he’d never been there at all.

“Walk me through it again,” Stevie said, not because she wanted to frustrate him but because she genuinely didn’t understand. The confusion was probably more derived from the fact that she hadn’t seen or heard about the man first.

David sighed and scooped up his final mouthful of Twyla’s fruit pie. The custard had long gone cold. “I promise you there is literally nothing more to it than what I’ve said. I went in expecting Mr. Butani at his desk, and there was a soldier or a Marine or _someone_ on the floor crying and crying, surrounded by a ton of crumpled papers. I left, opened the door again a couple of minutes later, and he was gone. Ray didn’t say a thing.”

Stevie chewed over the words in her head as thoroughly as she was chewing the Twinkie in her hand. It was as though she had just heard the story for the first time and not the fifth. David supposed, given her history, that it was a habit of hers to try and bob and spin round the outward appearances of combatants, looking past the biggest lacerations and blunt dents for lone dilated pupils or small, deadly bits of shrapnel.

“I still feel odd, and I can’t make heads nor tails of it! What the hell am I to expect, he could have been anyone! He could have been a real weirdo out to get someone–”

David knew as soon as he’d said it that it was the wrong thing to say. Stevie looked at him for a long, long time, and raised her eyebrows. This was the opposite of when he’d told her about the department store. She was decidedly not impressed with David’s choice of words.

“David, can I ask you a personal question?”

David winced, but didn’t feel unsafe. They had crossed many boundaries at this point. Stevie _was_ his personal life, really.

“Why do I feel like one is coming anyway?”

“How did you spend the war?”

“What?”

“The war. How did you spend the war. And where, for that matter.”

David took a sip of wine. It paired badly with the fruit pie. Dorothy Collins had bowed out on stage and a jazz group had taken her place, the smooth saxophone and mellow keyboard hushing the room, turning the atmosphere right down as though there was a knob on Stevie’s wall for doing just that. Where Dorothy had been wearing a white, winking thing, the sparkles on her dress catching too keenly on the camera and drowning out the rest of her, the jazz group were wearing black, and it dimmed the television screen immensely. The light dropped outside, and it dropped inside, too.

Where _hadn’t_ he spent the war? He’d been to Zürich and Monaco, Los Angeles and Buenos Aires and Barcelona in all that time. Places that were safe. Never Normandy, though. Nor Crete nor Monte Cassino nor the Soviet Union, nor any of the places a good, respectable, patriotic young man should have been, or so they said. He had read and eaten bread and stayed awake at night thinking about it, and all the while there were boys fifteen years younger than him and lying about their age stuttering and choking their way to heaven on the beaches.

There was a conscription crisis in his mother country in 1944. Living in New York but a Canadian by birth, David had not been oblivious to the fights for and against compulsory service, a struggle haunted by the political rifts created by conscientious objectors the last time around. David had already decided long ago that he would not sign up. Coupled with the conscription crisis, in the end David hadn’t ended up fighting at all, nor even had his name on list to go up with the draft at the last minute. He had sat his father down and told him one day, near the beginning of the war, and it was the closest thing to pride in Johnny Rose’s eyes that David had ever seen. He tapped his wooden knee and smiled and said “well, ain’t that a relief.”

Alexis was different. She _wanted in_ on the action, wanted to see what it was all about. There were things she could not tell David and swore she would never tell him until fifty years or more had passed. But he’d heard them anyway, rushed out in a dark, cold whisper between their single motel beds. He heard how she’d spied for the Allies, pushed herself to the very brink of danger and back again then bought herself some diamonds in Harrod’s for her troubles the next day with Clara and Jennifer strutting by her side. She liked the chase, liked the threat of it all, and even in the scariest parts of her stories David could hear the adrenaline-fuelled nostalgia in her tone.

And Sebastien Raine, another unfortunate corner of David’s lonely past life, had visited Berlin in 1945. He strode right in as though 23,000 tons of all-American explosives weren’t being unloaded on top of the city and took photographs of the damage, took photographs of the dead. David had watched him hang them up in his dark room, shielding his eyes as Sebastien dipped and hung the photographs on the rail. Sebastien would tut and shake his head at them as they developed, then look back at David reproachfully.

“You know, there’s so much you’re missing while you’re holing yourself up here, David,” Sebastien said, talking with a disproportionate wisdom, like he’d been on the front line himself. “Something so…beautiful, and vital, like the very bones of humanity are sticking out the skin of civilisation.”

“I haven’t been holing myself up. I just don’t want to get hurt.”

It didn’t make sense to David. Sebastien treated war like an artistic plaything, like he could see a future where people would make movies and songs and paintings out of it without a shred of respect or experience, because he himself was contributing to that future right now. He later learned that it was all a mask, all a simple ruse to call David a coward. He’d found that one out the hard way when Sebastien had tried to paint him in white feathers for an exhibition after the war ended and David had gone Toronto and not left until Eli called them up one day to say so long, taking their millions with him.

“I…didn’t, really,” David said honestly. “I didn’t spend it any of the places you’re thinking of. I didn’t serve.”

Stevie’s face twisted derisively at his choice of words. “I wouldn’t call what those boys did _serving._ That implies there was something in it for them.”

David frowned. She was stalling. Something was coming. “So, what it is you wanted to say?”

Stevie picked at a thread on the end of her plaid tea dress. “It was harder than the news makes out, you know. It’s all well and good when you get to see the men in the street who came out in one piece with the medals on their breast pocket, but they never show the way we were sat behind them the whole time, choking on our pickled onion sandwiches and waiting to rush out and collect them when they lost a part of themselves.”

“You did a good job,” he said, because despite his and Stevie’s mutual allergy to sincerity, it wasn’t really the time to joke. “You were brave.”

“You got the stomach for a story?”

If people in real life had catchphrases like they did in the pictures, then Stevie Budd’s would be that. It wasn’t that she _liked_ to regale David with stories of her time as a volunteer in the Army Nurse Corps from 1942 to the end of the war, but she felt like she didn’t talk about it enough for all the things she’d seen. And after three years of dinners and drinks and nights in the car, David felt like he’d seen half of it too.

“Go on,” David said, because Stevie didn’t tell her stories unless it really mattered.

“There was a soldier on my ward in ’43 who spent the longest time there out of any. Some of the North Africa boys who’d got it bad came for long-term refuge in their birth cities and we came back with them, so for the best part of a year I was stationed at a home ward in Chicago.”

She said ‘Chicago’ like it was pronounced ‘Chi-cah-gee’, as Annie Oakley or Calamity Jane might, chipping their teeth on the words in careless confidence. She was hard, Stevie was. She was mean and stocky and work-denim blue, and would probably stand with her fists on her hips in front of stubborn soldiers the same way she did in the general store when the headscarved old women in the line called her a slut. And David just wanted to listen and listen.

“Anyway, this boy,” Stevie continued. “He wasn’t anything like I’d known before. And I didn’t know how to deal with it. He’d yell at every word I said, and the hospital wardens made me tend to him because I was the only one who didn’t flinch. With all my half-brothers, it was almost like I spent my life training to listen to slightly older boys screaming at me.”

Stevie laughed mirthlessly. David waited for her to continue.

“And he was thin, real thin. That was because he didn’t eat. We brought them all meat and Bovril and us nurses halved our sugar rations to bulk theirs up, and he never ate a single bit of it. Maybe he thought if he could hold out for long enough, he’d eventually waste away and that would be the end of it. It got to the point where I would walk up to his bed and start thinking about all the things that I might write next to the cause of his death when it eventually happened. _Failure to thrive,_ maybe. Or maybe just _The War._ I felt so nasty about it that I started giving him all my sugar rations, but he still didn’t eat.”

David had lost the point of the story long ago and had no idea where Stevie was going with it, but he didn’t want it to stop. When it was Stevie, there was always a point.

“Did you ever find out why he never ate?”

Stevie swallowed. She looked down at the empty box of Twinkies and the empty bowls, still rimmed with custard. She stuck a pinkie finger in the crook of the ceramic and coated her finger, then brought it to her mouth.

“Only afterwards,” she murmured over the finger on her gums. “We tried. We really tried; we did. We thought we might even nose-feed him like a suffrage fighter, but he wouldn’t take it. He wouldn’t take it when we yelled back at him. He used to say weird things to me at night. Even more so when he was dying. ‘I can still feel it,’ he’d say. ‘It was on me.’”

David and Stevie looked down at the bowls. They suddenly seemed much less palatable.

“What was on him?” David quietly prompted.

Stevie shuddered minutely. She pushed the bowls away.

“The bits of his friend who’d stepped on a grenade.”

David balked. He couldn’t see his face pale, but knew it had happened because his hands had paled. He knew Stevie hadn’t said all that to humble him, that she wasn’t using these real men’s lives to drill in some silly lesson about careless wording, but he still felt terrible and shocked and haunted beyond fucking belief. It made him feel a few inches outside his body, thinking about the things that had happened. Six years was not a long time. He wondered what he was doing at the exact moment that that had happened. God, he’d been living in the same world as it.

“So you just, you just don’t know,” Stevie said, and that was what she’d been saying the whole time. “You never, ever know why. Why someone is the way they are.”

The credits were rolling on the screen. David leaned over and switched off the television. It was much less of a chore than switching it on had been.

“Well, I…” David looked at the black screen and twisted his mouth. “I guess I should go.”

Stevie picked up the second unopened bottle of wine. She proffered it towards him, and for a moment he saw Paulina, and the time she had looked at him, and he’d looked at her, and they’d kept on pouring drinks for all the life they had left.

“One more for the road?” Stevie said, and her voice sounded just like Paulina’s had done.

One more turned into four glasses each, and by the time David did leave the apartment life felt a little fuller, but no less unimportant. He kissed Stevie’s cheek and made his way back to the motel, not once stopping to think about the past or the future until he was in bed, scratchy covers pulled right up to his chin, and falling into an uneasy sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- I promise nice, lighthearted times are coming...at some point! I know this isn't a particularly fun story just yet, but please bear with me, lol.


	3. The Marine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- I'm still adding songs to my [Pearls](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7nuz23X1JAAWVhXHrjcpzF?si=a1R0rJRKSIareX1rtvyDBw) playlist if you want to listen and follow!

For what felt like an hour, David had been sat at the table in his and Alexis’ room, pushing the remaining cornflakes around his bowl as they retained more and more room temperature milk. He tried to have one more mouthful. It was soggy and stuck to the roof of his mouth. He sighed and sat back, resigning himself to give full attention to the activity Alexis had been trying to engage him in all morning.

“What about these ones?” she said, selecting another two dresses from the deeper nooks of her wardrobe.

David examined the dresses. They looked like they had been left in the same spot since Alexis had shoved them there in a huff three years ago, reacting to David’s complaints about her mess by crumpling every dress she owned into a ball and hurling it into the cupboard. Even so, they were still beautiful. Just like his black Rolex or his mother’s every word, they were some of those painful homages to past indulgence. It was an indulgence that David was now coming to realize was a little thoughtless, perhaps even empty, but he could hardly help missing the times when he was able to pay up so easily that it was as though things didn’t cost at all.

The first was a navy blue number with square jet style buttons and a cream undercollar, cinched at the waist with an elasticated belt in the same shade of cream. Relic of the last decade though it was, the flattering calf length cut still looked suitably modern. Alexis could make anything look modern. The second was a shorter gingham swing dress, red and loud with a full A-Line skirt. It was a gorgeous piece with a low sweetheart neckline, finished with a contrasting white hem to match its halter neck straps. It was the same one she’d worn beneath a denim work shirt of Mutt’s when they were still dating and paired it with brown cowboy boots, a straw hat atop braided hair, a rouged nose and sharp dark freckles on her cheeks to go as a scarecrow for Twyla’s Halloween bash. Alexis seemed to be leaning towards the latter; she was shaking the red fabric and winking conspicuously in its direction.

“Aren’t these a bit too summery?” David said.

Alexis stared at him like he had only just materialized in the room painted green and started to bite through all her clothes.

“Well obviously they’re _summery_ , you Dumb Dora! They’re for my graduation party!”

“Which is _six months away?”_

“I know, right?” Alexis squealed, as though David had said it was tomorrow. “We’re having a fair out on the school pitch after the ceremony with a Ferris wheel and games and a baseball tournament. The whole town is invited. It’s going to be _so_ cute.”

Incredulous, David stood up, pushing his chair in forcefully. “Have I seriously wasted an hour of my morning looking at dresses that you’re going to be wearing in July? Have I taught you nothing?”

“Ugh, you could have at least been helpful, David.” Alexis began to snatch up the discarded dresses and skirts as David grabbed his coat, looking at the time on his watch with a jolt. He was going to be late.

“Okay, I have to go now. Jocelyn asked me if I wanted to come for breakfast while I speak to Roland about the business, and I guess that means she’s already made, like, seven plates.”

Alexis grabbed her stomach and made a vulgar sound with her tongue. “Woof. Well, make sure you use the outhouse instead of the indoor bathroom tonight, or that won’t be pleasant for anyone.”

David grimaced. “Why don’t _you_ make sure you leave enough time to get all the creases out your ugly little dresses. You only have six months, after all!”

David grabbed his bag and swung out of the room. What little there was left of his irritation dissolved as the door slammed shut behind him. Both he and Alexis knew that their high-strung emotions were nothing, that their words were nothing. The slightest hint of annoyance at the other was only ever a pedestal for a form of communication they had grown into comfortably over the past three years, making a welcome change from the pitiful excuse for a relationship they’d maintained before.

Alexis had been doing a lot of growing on her own as well, by the looks of things. Both the Rose children had boarded for their last years of high school – David at Eton, Alexis in Switzerland – until it came out last fall that Alexis hadn’t actually finished high school at all, and had skipped straight to a finishing school in the same country to learn how to count spoons and get out of cars so she could be with her friends, most of whom were a year older. When the initial anger had subsided, Johnny and Moira were quietly embarrassed that they hadn’t even noticed the skip in her grades. As if to make up for lost time – of which there was a lot, for Alexis had been jet setting around the edges of the globe for the best part of a decade now – they had sent her straight back to school when they learned about it, playing the part of the strict, loving parents they had needed to be all along.

As David walked towards the Schitt’s house, his weather inappropriate Oxfords crunching on the salted roads, he thought about how much the town reminded him of his sister. Every inch of it seemed to be full of her voice, for she was the one who connected every other voice in the town. Not a year into the Rose’s inhabitancy here, Moira had suggested that Alexis put her gift of the gab to good use and apply for a job operating the town switchboard, tying the people of Schitt’s Creek to their families in Elmdale and Ted’s veterinary office and Twyla’s Diner. It was the light, frothy twinkle of her up and down tone that relayed the orders to Twyla when David and Stevie made their pickup orders on Tuesday nights, making puking noises at their choices and trying to persuade him to get something “that, like, won’t wreak havoc on your complexion, David.” It had made her brighter; brighter in a way that David hadn’t known was possible. It was only after getting her job that he truly realized how sparkless she had been before. She had grown up immensely since coming here, but in a strange way that meant she had gotten younger in spirit, reliving days she had missed and didn’t know she needed. As brash, loud and screeching as she was, David still felt sick with relief when she walked through the door on a night in one piece, smelling of fried donuts and Coca Cola instead of day-old sweat and the burning plastic of other people’s drugs. So he couldn’t wait for her graduation, really, because for all her twenty seven years of age she was getting the chance to be a girl again. He decided that he would try harder to help her pick a dress when he came home.

David was nearly there, rubbing his fingers against each other inside his pockets to keep warm, when he passed Ray Butani’s office again. The sight settled in his stomach in the same way pitted fruits did: achy, angry, and ready to propel back out of him at any moment. It had been a week since his incident at Ray’s and it had been dogging his mind ever since, like he was walking around the town with a dirty secret. Or perhaps there were people that knew about this boy already, and only David wasn’t in on the secret. He hadn’t gotten to know Ray properly like he had some of the other townsfolk, so for all he knew the Marine could have been a nephew on leave or an adopted son or a family friend, one close enough with Ray to bare himself like that on the floor of his office.

Before he could help himself, David backtracked until he was stood in front of Ray’s window. There were two windows at the front of his building, one that zeroed in on his desk and the other that showed the more residential portion of his house. David cupped his hands over the sides of his eyes and peered in, not so conscious about how rude he looked as he could have been. It was early, the sky still damp and gray, sagging like a net of fish over the snoozing town. He could see the sofa and a sliver of the coffee table, and the kitchen which David hadn’t been in last week. It was neat and orderly, decked out in the same pastel orange as the table. David startled when he saw Ray come round the corner from the stairs into the kitchen wearing a striped brown dressing gown, his hair mussed with sleep. He plucked the glass cafetiere from its holder and poured one cup of coffee. Then, David couldn’t help but note, he poured another. Ray left one of the cups on the counter and went back upstairs holding the other. Having at least confirmed to himself that someone else was still there, David made to leave, but then he saw what looked like someone meeting Ray on the stairs and taking the cup from him.

David didn’t stay to see if the person came downstairs or went back up, for he was already hurrying away and back on his original path to the Schitt’s. He didn’t stop until he was on the house’s lane, then placed a hand on the veranda bannister and took a few deep inhales to catch his breath. The chipped, gaudy “The Schitt Family Welcomes You!” sign at the entrance creaked and dripped in the cold breeze. It was going to rain today.

He hadn’t seen much, but he was fairly certain that the arm belonged to the Marine. It was thick and freckled and dry. Though he’d been decked out in boots and khaki field pants, on his torso he’d had only a white T-shirt that was old and stained and soaked with sweat.

* * *

_1949_

It made David think of a day, just a few months before his family came to Schitt’s Creek, where he’d gone to visit a friend in Beverly Hills. He waited and waited, eventually driving away from the district and heading south to look for the nearest telephone to drop them a line because when he’d pulled up to their estate, no one was home. He parked his almost-empty car by a passing place on a busy road and seated himself on the ledge of a bridge. He thought about how his friend hadn’t been responding to his letters. How they had only remembered that they’d extended an invitation to David when David reminded them. So David sat, sulking and panicking about the gas in his car, and watched the sun go down.

“Don’t jump, sonny,” a voice beside him said. “We’re all going to die someday, but why does it have to be now?”

To his right stood a grizzled, middle-aged man, a tiredness set deep in his eyes that made David think he’d been talked down from a ledge or two of his own in time and was now extending the favor to younger men who reminded him of himself.

“I wasn’t going to.”

The man relaxed. He pulled out a cigarette and leaned by the bridge as he lit it. The light fall breeze pushed the scent towards David, the vinegar and scorched wood smell of the smoke reminding him of solitary nights in London and Paris, holding drinks and swirling ice that glinted and dripped in the heat of the candlelight, dark and calm and deliciously private.

The cars on the road began to slow. Some of them joined David’s in the passing place. He hoped they would move before he started the slow trudge of a journey back home.

“Ah,” the man said, pointing a hand to his left. David saw what had made the cars move: an uncountable troop of Marines, one indistinguishable from the other in their olive drab Vandergriff tunics, were marching down the road towards Camp Pendleton, a ten-minute drive from where David sat. Their boots crunched in satisfying synchronicity on the hot concrete, arms swinging like pendulums at their sides, their faces reading nothing, nothing, nothing.

“Semper fidelis,” the man said. David looked at him. “Always ready,” he clarified. “It’s their motto. Our motto.”

The man chuckled, his eyes glazing as he looked at the troop of boys in whose tan, double-tied boots he must have been not so long ago.

“Trust me...it’s not true.”

* * *

_1952_

David ran his thumb over a gash in the wood of the bannister. A raindrop hanging from the roof above shuddered and dropped over it, seeping into the gash and glazing it over like a stained-glass window.

“David!”

He jumped. Jocelyn was stood in the doorway, a bowl on her hip, smiling widely down at him. She jerked her head towards the door, beckoning him inside. He gave himself one shake, two shakes, then followed her.

The Schitt’s kitchen was the same as it always was, humid and homely and vaguely cheesy. Jocelyn bustled around, shuffling bowls and putting spatulas in the sink. Roland was bent double over his breakfast, alternating between three plates as fast as he was alternating between using his spoon and his hands to shovel the food into his mouth. Roland Jr. was sat in a makeshift playpen on the floor, a wooden rattle in his small, pudgy hand, transfixed by the clacking and bobbing of _Muffin the Mule_ on the television.

“Have a seat next to Roly, David, and I’ll make you a plate,” Jocelyn said.

David sat himself down opposite Roland. The first mistake. Roland raised a hand in greeting, his fingers covered in – _what is that, cream? Oatmeal?_

“Glad you could join me in such an informal setting,” Roland mumbled, his words fighting for dominance over his mouthful of porridge. He took a swig of coffee and swallowed the whole lot down in a gulp. “What with you being so…”

Roland pursed his lips, his head bobbling in David’s direction. David grimaced.

“I…don’t know what that means, but okay.”

“Anyway,” Roland went on, ignoring David, “I heard a lil’ rumor through the shit-pipes that you’re planning on creating a _department_ store in the town? Is that right?”

“Um…yeah.”

“Do you have a short-term lease and a contingency plan in place?”

“I – no, I don’t think so, Ray just said that we’d –”

“Have you determined who your competition is in Elmdale, Elm Glen and Elm Valley?”

“No, but –”

“Have you made a list of the ways opening something like a department store could possibly sabotage your unique business philosophy?”

“I –” David’s mouth snapped shut. He _had_ done that one, actually.

He opened and closed his mouth, trying to think of something to say. He must have looked like a fish because Roland started wheezing, banging a hand on the table and pointing at David’s expression. Roland had a unique talent of breaking the tension with his laughter without making the recipient feel any less uncomfortable.

“Your _face,_ David, gee whiz! You look like I’d made you doubt the viability of your whole business idea,” Roland said.

Well, he had.

“Leave him be, Roly, you’re meant to be encouraging him here!” Jocelyn said as she approached them, putting more plates down on the table.

The sound Alexis had made before he left came straight to mind when Jocelyn plonked David’s two options down in front of him. The first was a bowl of oatmeal, plain and unassuming but for the copious amounts of shredded cheese piled on top, and the other one…well. There were only a few things in David’s life that he’d ever had cause to call unholy, but by God, if this wasn’t one of them. Two waffles sat, flattened by and seemingly oblivious to the hell smeared over them, in the middle of the floral china plate. What looked like Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, canned tuna and stuffed olives had been heated to death and ladled on top of the waffles. And there was an actual sprig of parsley on top, as though David was meant to eat that too.

“You just take what you’d like, David, be my guest!” Jocelyn said cheerily.

David leaned into the plates. That was the second mistake. He tried not to bring up the few cornflakes he’d eaten that morning as he breathed in the smell.

“Thanks.” He learned it was difficult to speak through your nose.

“Nah, Joce knows I’m just poking fun, don’t you, love? Just a little mayor’s test to see if you’ve got the stones.” He pushed his plate aside and leaned forward. “Between you and me, Dave, I really think you’ve got something here. I think we’re all a little sick of looking at the boarded-up lots in the town, even if your ideas will be a bit…what is it? Oven – Abent – Alan’s gourd?”

“Avant garde...?”

“Yeah, that.” Sucking the final morsels off his fingers, Roland sat back with a contented sigh like he’d just eaten the last meal of his day, not the first. “Anyway, I thought I’d get you to sign some stuff just to confirm you’re not gonna fuck it up or whatever the forms are for, and you can be on your way.”

“Language in front of the baby, Roly!” Jocelyn reprimanded.

David looked down at the breakfast. He picked up a spoon to try for oatmeal. He managed two bites, but after that he couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t. He was still wrapping his head around how he’d had to sit in front of _that_ monstrosity to sign a declaration of intent, when he caught Jocelyn looking at him expectantly. He needed an out.

“Jocelyn, can I use your phone?” David said.

She nodded and showed him through to the parlor, where David was thankful to leave the weird, happy family to their dairy-filled, olives-and-tuna-for-breakfast devices. He picked it up and swung Ray’s number into the dial.

“Morning, Mrs. Schitt! Kirk Street 99-565?” Alexis sing-songed.

“Alexis, it’s me!”

“Eugh!” Alexis dropped all pretence of trying to get back into Jocelyn’s good books after the forged handwriting debacle of two weeks ago. “What do you want, David?”

“Um, the same thing you thought Jocelyn wanted? 99-565. Put me through, now.”

“Okay, but don’t use the phone again today. Your voice has already ruined my day.” David heard Alexis unplug the metal jack and shove it into a different hole before the connection cut off and he was through to Ray.

“Ray, it’s David,” he said.

“Ah, good morning!” David could hear the smile that would give him so many wrinkles one day. Not that Ray would mind. “How can I help you this morning, David?”

“I…I–” David raised a head to the Schitt’s kitchen, remembering how he’d implied he had something pressing to talk about. “I was wondering if, um…you had a moment to talk about the business’ finances with me? We didn’t really get a chance to talk the other day, and I…”

Ray laughed. David cleared his throat.

“David, that’s not the kind of conversation you’ll want to have over the telephone! I’ve ended up in some very sticky situations that way. You won’t want to hear them, some of them get very dangerous.” David said nothing as Ray continued. “Oh! You’ve just given me an idea. I have a full day of meetings tomorrow, but why don’t you come over for dinner tonight and you can go over some of the things you wanted to ask me? I’ll be eating around seven o’clock, if that’s alright with you.”

David pretended that it wasn’t the intrigue of the other figure that had fuelled his response when he said, “Yes, Ray. Thanks.”

“Wonderful. I hope you don’t mind that Patrick eats with us too?”

_Patrick._

That had to be him. The name rolled off Ray’s tongue like it was well-worn, a name that came already full of memory and association beyond a dog tag or boots. He must have known Patrick for a few years. At least since he was a boy. He must be family, or as good as.

“No, no, I don’t mind at all.”

“Wonderful!” Ray said again. “See you in ten hours, I suppose!”

David put the phone down. “Sorry, Jocelyn, I have to go,” David said. From the parlor, he could see Roland digging into David’s breakfast. “I have a meeting with Mr. Butani and I need to, um…prepare.”

Ten hours away though it might have been, he wasn’t exactly lying.

* * *

_New York, 1945_

David had never seen a city in such celebration and delirium.

He was used to darting, used to dancing around them, playing hopscotch with the world. He was used to choosing cities at random and calling for the family yacht; used to picking cities like sugared almonds in a Christmas box, and walking around in them like his mother walked through the balconied mezzanine floor of their Toronto estate. David went wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted.

David might not have loved New York in particular, but he loved the way it preened and keened for him, the way it thrust inside him in a faceless whirl of wines and operas, filling him up with an earnest, heady pretension while he laid prone and took every last drop, every single night. In an adulthood that was gently creeping into something that smelled a bit too keenly of loneliness, David had always admired how a city could make him feel like he had a legion of old friends dotted sporadically around the globe, dropping everything to host and accommodate him. It was nearly twenty years since he had vowed in Bruges to wear every city of the world thin, and he was well on his way to making good on his promise.

But not now. Now, he couldn’t move.

He had been planning to take off for London that day, but even if he had called Vincent to drive him to the airport it would have taken the frazzle little chauffeur a hefty dose of divine intervention to cut through the masses of people in the streets. David, along with seven million others, was stifling under the sun, under the joy. All he could hear bursting and bouncing around him for miles and miles and miles was the music, the screams, the laughter of victory. The passion of it was like a French song. It was so bright, so palpable, so insanely wonderful that David must have let out more than a few barks of laughter and shed more than a few tears of his own, letting himself get lost in the people that jostled him. It was so hard to move unless the crowd decided otherwise. He would pull away, and the crowd would throw him back into its many arms, as if Allies on Allies on Allies had fused to form one giant, free entity.

Blossoming, intoxicated and almost happy, David was grateful he had lost sight of Sebastien many hours ago. He was very, very grateful. He joined onto the open end of a handheld circle, which linked like a metal chain into another lively farandole, and then another, and then another, until all of New York, presumably, was stomping and crashing and not caring a jot for how they looked.

David certainly didn’t. He didn’t care that he had woken up with Sebastien’s possessive arm slung over his chest and some unknown person’s makeup smeared along his neck, for it was all gone now. He didn’t have to think about it. Not now.

“David!”

Whoever it was that had shouted his name, David could barely even hope to identify them in the crowd. There were a dozen hands waving to a dozen people in one eye and the same in the other, all connected yet so different, and David was awash in strangers. Perhaps they hadn’t even been talking to him. He was one of a hundred thousand David’s, after all. He was a stranger, too.

“David Rose, det- _ach_ your skinny little ass from the crowd this instant!”

And of that high, jangling, deliciously obnoxious voice there was no doubt.

David jerked his neck up, to the left, to the left ever still until he was staring upside down at Marc Beauchamp, a mass of coiled artificial wig and Bakelite pearls clacking against his big teeth, where he was chewing on them with his charming, indulgent smirk. David had befriended him because he reminded David of his mother, and that had amused him. There were stark differences between Marc and Moira too, however, for Marc had the biggest heart of anyone David had ever known and was probably his only real friend in this godforsaken city that was starting to run threadbare under David’s nihilistic feet.

“Marc, I don’t think there’s anything at all I could help you with right now.”

Marc rolled his eyes and yanked David out from the scrambling masses, plopping him down on the raised steps of the storefront he was standing on. David brushed himself off with a grunt and a deep exhale at the relief of being released. “Thanks,” David said.

Marc smiled widely, his two front teeth stained with red lipstick in a half-moon, where he must have shared someone’s cigarette moments ago. It could either have been that or residue from the bright shock of red that was smeared haphazardly around his mouth, crooked and endearing.

“It’s not me that needs help. _You’re_ the one who needs help choosing what you’re going to wear for opening night tonight!”

David frowned. “Opening night of what?” he said, still straining to be heard over the crowds.

“What?”

_“I said opening night of what!”_

“Sebastien’s show, of course!”

David felt his chest frost over with icy panic. He had forgotten about the show. Sebastien had been keeping him vaguely up to date with the photograph exhibit that supposedly had pictures of David in it. The photo shoot came to him in half memories every now and again, hitting him like a hangover and making him feel oddly uneasy. Like there was something he should know, something everyone else knew, but someone had neglected to tell him until it was too late.

Marc and David squeezed through the last few bottlenecks of the crowd before turning off sharply into a thin alleyway, the din crumbling away behind them. Marc still had David clasped by the wrist and was nattering cheerily all the way to the gallery where Sebastien’s show was being held later that day. It was the kind of show that was oblivious to the communal victory outside, intended for an audience who were equally oblivious to it. The gallery was, naturally, well off the beaten path and understated in a way that felt ahead of its time, a way that most regular people would regard with an eyeroll and a cringe.

“You know, I’d be surprised if he’s able to do anything more surprising than the time he wound telephone wires around your neck and chopped the photographs to make it look like you were in the sky,” Marc was rambling as they stepped into the gallery, climbing the narrow white back staircase. “I know I said I’d take you shopping for clothes, but we could at least stop in to look at the photographs before –”

Marc stopped short. David barrelled into his crushed velvet jacket with an ‘oof’, before he stopped short as well.

Any hope of enjoying one moment, one moment away from the lonely tangles of his life that he wasn’t ready to admit were the only reason he was allowed to envelop himself in so many different cities every year, was dashed by the sight before him.

As David watched laborers stand huge, billboard-like photos of himself against the walls, the half-memories came to him in full clarity. Sebastien seeing that he was good and drunk the night before, releasing the desperate and pliable side of David that David had learned with hindsight was once the only version of him that existed. Sebastien draping him over surfaces, decorating him in white feathers and a prop soldier’s hat that he’d found in a theatre. Sebastien, betraying the trust David had handed to him on a platter, warping his insecurities, capitalizing on the fears that David had shared with him in the dead of night about not enlisting and about how people might see him. Sebastien, controlling how people saw David Rose. Once again and forever.

“What do you think of them?” that poisonous, gravelly voice called, utterly unfazed by the pain David could feel slashing and splitting his face into broken little bits. “It took me rather a while to find someone to take them up to this size. You know, I think this might be just what the people need to see in a time like this. To help them separate, in their discrete consciences, the lives and connections they need to prioritise in the coming decade as they…”

David didn’t hear the rest. He only heard Marc, his one and only friend, shouting himself hoarse at Sebastien. He heard the tap of his brogues on the whitewashed steps. He heard the damning voice in his head, worn out from its own self-loathing, telling him that he didn’t belong in there or out here, with the happy crowds. He knew nothing about the world. He knew nothing about war.

London would have to wait. A place like that, it didn’t deserve him.

* * *

_1952_

David knocked on Ray’s door at precisely a quarter to seven, dreading the risk of what he might stumble into should he barge in again like last time, despite Ray making it known to the town that his home office was a “public space, so feel free to drop in whenever you like!” It was a strange announcement to make to a full café, but David had thought about his business and taken him up on the offer anyway.

As David waited for the door to open, watching faded silhouettes shuffle behind the frosted glass pane in the door, his belly began to flutter. Dinner with Ray wasn’t the problem; in fact, David had spent the past week bracing himself to grit his teeth and ask the question before Ray did, as a formality for two people about to go into business together. It was that _Patrick_ would be there, even though David was certain that Patrick hadn’t seen him when he’d dashed in and out again.

Finally, blessedly, Ray turned up at the door, putting a stopper in David’s flowing thoughts because he was in the moment now and there wasn’t anything more to think about.

“Ah David! I’m so glad you’ve come. You two can sit yourselves down in the living room while I put the final touches on dinner.”

David smiled thinly and ducked into Ray’s house. He felt like he’d taken the same path into the living room a hundred times this week, even though this was only the second. He made to sit down in the same spot he’d been in last week and found, if the shaven head were anything to go by, that the Marine was already sat there.

He didn’t look up as David entered the room. David bent the knuckle of his left index finger and knocked twice on the door, then immediately felt stupid. Of course Patrick knew he would be coming. Ray had probably told him so. Ray had _just_ let him through the door, for Christ’s sake.

David rounded the corner and sat himself down in the armchair near the door, so that Patrick was sat to his right. He cleared his throat. He looked at the coffee table and picked up a newspaper for something to do, and it was only after he’d spent half a minute pretending to read that he realized he’d picked up the one in Gujarati.

Patrick was looking at him. David’s neck warmed gently with the intensity of his gaze. He pretended to look at the Indian newspaper for a second more then put it back on the table, took a deep breath – one that sounded much louder in his head and felt more like a mental gee-up – and stared Patrick straight in the eyes.

There was so much to unpack and yet here he was, plain and underdressed and looking like he’d just woken up. The soft circles under his brown eyes matched the whiskey-colored scruff on his chin, his head rough and round like a stubbled bowling ball. David wondered how his hair might look if it grew out of the brutal, sensible cut. He wondered who had cut it for him.

From all he had seen, David wasn’t sure what he had expected Patrick to look like. He had seen the uniform before anything else. And now that David thought about it properly, he wondered why Patrick had been wearing the uniform at all if he was here, presumably on leave. He was dressed differently now. A comfortable, navy blue Henley clung snugly to his broad, muscled shoulders, and –

David’s eyes trailed unbidden down Patrick’s body, an action he hoped Patrick didn’t pick up on or find too invasive or lewd. But he couldn’t help it because the man was wearing sleep pants. Real, honest-to-goodness, stripy blue pyjamas at a public dinner gathering, and it was equal parts absurd and adorable and David was getting more and more confused by the second.

So he did what he had spent the past thirty years doing: filling the voids he didn’t understand with meaningless, mindless chatter. It was practically the front page of the socialite’s playbook.

“How long have you been staying with Ray, Patrick?” David said.

Patrick flinched, his eyes fixed on his feet. He looked unaccustomed to hearing his name on a stranger’s tongue, and if his expression flashed with fear for just a second then David didn’t let on that anything was amiss. David waited a little bit, but Patrick didn’t answer. David was stuck thinking about what his voice might sound like. He was trying awfully hard for another topic, an easier question.

“So, um…to Ray, who – who are you?” David tried. Patrick’s brow creased minutely, his mouth a thin, protective line. “Are you a nephew, a son, or…?”

Patrick looked away. He hadn’t been making a great deal of eye contact, but the simple act of putting a stop to it made David’s stomach drop. After fumbling his words at Stevie’s last week, he would absolutely hate to say something ignorant again, especially where it would have mattered the most.

The clock on Ray’s mantle seemed to get louder, the sound cupping David’s ears and rattling round the room, impossible to ignore now that he had heard it. Ray popped in, switched on the electric fire, then popped out. David had long since stopped waiting for an answer when he received it.

“I guess everyone is someone’s son.”

It wasn’t so much what he’d said that took David aback, but his voice. It hit David like a wave of deep fatigue might, if that wave came with the comfort of already being tucked up in the softest bed in the world.

_God, that voice._

He was an American. A Texan. He was curious and lilting and so, _so_ soft-spoken, the words seeping from his mouth slowly and sleepily like butter scraped over bread, like honey scooped onto the fingertips. The sentence had come out sounding like a thousand, some words inflected or tipped or smoother than others, but all heavy. Some heavy like a warm pillow, others like a ton of bricks. There were layers to him, David could tell; barriers and padlocks and tin roofs all shrouded in a cloth of pure, undiluted world-weariness. No wonder he was wearing sleep pants. He sounded so tired.

David didn’t press for details. He caught a glance at Ray, ladling something yellow and liquid over a steaming place. David’s stomach turned, thinking about what Jocelyn had served him, but then Ray reopened the pan lid and David caught a whiff of something gorgeous. A creamy mixture of onions and cumin and fenugreek. Ray poked his head into the living room and waved them through to the dining area.

He served three plates of what looked like a kadhi inspired version of a simple sausage and mashed potatoes dish, the curried gravy spicy and rich and rather like something David had eaten in Rajasthan in the 30s. His mother was filming a picture where she played a feisty explorer who wore a disproportionately scant amount of clothes for the kinds of adventures she was going on, and she had taken David along with her. He had drunk a sweet, refreshing juice of sugarcane, lemon and pepper under a large umbrella as his mother’s stunt double dashed from building to stone building and kissed the girl who was helping her mother do Moira’s makeup. He would spend the whole of his twenties trying to recreate that juice, but never got as far as even finding the right kind of lemons and wasted far too many of his war rations on pepper.

He said as much to Ray, who beamed widely at the story. Patrick didn’t say anything. He kept his eyes trained on his food and ate like he was borrowing someone else’s time.

“This was the first meal I had when my friends and I emigrated here,” Ray said. “We all live in different parts of the province now, but we like to meet up every now and again to cook together.” Ray poured two glasses of wine, one for him and one for David. Then he poured a glass of water for Patrick without asking whether he wanted any wine, as though it was a customary order. When he sat back down, he gasped as though he’d forgotten something. “Oh, how rude of me! I didn’t even think to properly introduce you two to each other. David, this is Lance Corporal Patrick Brewer –”

There was a clatter. Patrick’s fork had come down forcefully onto his plate. His jaw was twitching. David thought he heard the smallest pained grunt.

Ray looked flushed. “I – _ahem_. David, this is Patrick Brewer. He’s been staying with me for the past month while…Patrick, this is David Rose. He’s going to open up a department store on Main Street.”

“Speaking of, I’m not so keen on the label ‘department store’ anymore,” David said.

Ray seemed to be glad for the change in conversation, interrupting before David could make his intentions with the store clearer. “You’ve just reminded me why I invited you over in the first place! You had some questions about finances?”

Patrick glanced up for a second, then kept eating. David swallowed. He felt a little silly when it dawned on him that he had essentially lied his way into a dinner party to get out of eating Jocelyn’s horrid breakfast. That said, Roland’s ‘jokes’ about his business had cranked up his anxieties to some degree. He’d been in contact with craftspeople across the town and up and down the county, and he’d made a lot of panic orders of products that had come delivered to the motel with a complimentary glare from Stevie for disrupting her workday. Apart from that, he really had no idea what he was doing.

“I was just wondering where to start, really,” David said. “I don’t have a great deal left over after buying the lots, and I bought a load of products the other day that –”

Ray frowned. “You’ve made deals with people already?”

“Deals? No, I just bought things from them, so when the time comes, I can sell them in the store –” David stopped to interrupt himself, muttering, “and now that I’ve said that out loud, I’ve realized what a dumb idea it was.”

Ray laughed, tutting fondly. “I’m glad you said so yourself, David! I would have felt rude to mention it, but it really was a stupid thing to do.”

David blinked. He was certain that Ray could have cursed his entire line of descendants and made it sound like he was inviting them over for a spot of afternoon tea.

“I’m…glad we agree.”

“I’m assuming you’ll have a lot of things to sell when you _are_ ready to buy, yes? Do you know what you’ll do if you don’t make as much of a return as you expected?”

David was shrinking by the second. “I – no, actually. I guess I just…expected to make return with a business like that.”

“You have to be prepared to survive a full year without making any profit.”

Ray was looking at David expectantly, waiting for him to respond, though it wasn’t actually Ray who had spoken. David realized the cutlery had stopped moving on Patrick’s plate, and he was no longer eating at breakneck speed but looking straight at David, albeit seeming thoroughly uncomfortable with the effort of contributing to the conversation.

David looked back. Patrick’s eyes were more awake now, perhaps more alert with a bit of food in him. David wondered if he had eaten anything else or whether he’d just slept all day. But that voice…David took a sip of wine for something to do, because his face felt flushed again for a reason he couldn’t quite place. He hoped Patrick hadn’t just woken up, and that voice hadn’t just been sleep-soft. He hoped that that was all there was.

“I…don’t think that that’s applicable to my situation,” David said. “Everyone keeps telling me it’s a good idea. My things are going to sell.”

“Yeah, but how do you know that?”

David scoffed. “Because everyone keeps _telling me_ that my things are going to sell –”

“I’m speaking to you from a business perspective. How do you actually _know_ that?”

His voice rose from its slumber, and David’s twinge of hope was confirmed. That was all there was.

David’s brow creased and softened as he mulled it over, trying to work out what it actually was that Patrick was asking him. There was something he was missing here, some integral part of business that David hadn’t quite grasped. Then it dawned on him. The business side of business was as alien to him as he was to the appeal of Jocelyn’s cooking.

The tense silence was broken by Ray scraping his fork around his plate. He scooped up a generous mouthful of mashed potatoes and said, “David, you don’t need to fuss about much of the finance, since you’ve very much established creative control. This is why I’m here!” As usual, his smile didn’t break, but he lost some of it around the eyes as he turned to Patrick. “Unless, Patrick, you’d be willing to, um…again…?”

Patrick didn’t answer, nor did he look at Ray. But David could see the fragments of the question snaking beneath Patrick’s collar, and he looked like he was twitching in discomfort. He rolled his shoulder and head like a nervous tick and resumed the pace with which he’d been eating before.

With the conversation lost, all three men continued eating. David snuck glances at Patrick, who didn’t look up again. It was disconcerting. It was beyond uncomfortable eating here, and watching Patrick eat. They were doing the exact same thing, their knives tapping and scraping along their plates, stepping into an awkward, quiet acquaintancy as though David hadn’t seen him with his mind and soul worlds away mere days ago. It was like seeing someone naked, seeing someone for all that they are, then meeting them again and having them give you a lesson on modesty and propriety. David felt like he knew too much already.

Before he had finished, Patrick gave up. David had been wondering which one of them would crack first.

“I want to go to bed, Ray,” he said. He left his nearly eaten meal and pushed himself away from the table, the screech of the chair sounding impossibly cavernous for the size of the room.

David watched him go, half expecting Ray to say something, but when David looked back Ray was sat with a pitiful and resigned look on his face. They made eye contact, and David found himself wishing for the first time that Ray was not so unflaggingly positive. There would have been so much David could have learned otherwise.

By the end of the meal, David was eager to leave and Ray seemed eager to see him out. “Don’t worry about the dishes, David, I’ll deal with it!” was his way of all but shoving him out of the door.

When he was outside, the rain was falling thick and fast. David did his best to shield his hair from the downpour but gave up after ten seconds and let it soak him to the skin. The sensation, after a while, was one he didn’t know he needed after the stifling atmosphere in Ray’s dining room. Even so, he had already learned on one aggressively wet night in 1947 that a black woollen Pierre Balmain peacoat was not born for the want of shelter from the rain. He would have to take the route back home that was longer but more densely thick with trees, thereby giving his hair and coat a fighting chance.

On the route, which he was half convinced he hadn’t taken in years, he passed a bench he had seen before but never sat down on. It was only when he approached it properly that he saw the small brass plaque nailed to the wooden backrest, caught faintly in the streetlight, raindrops staggering down the engraving:

_S.R.A. THOMAS CURRIE_

_1915-1942_

_MISSING IN ACTION JANUARY 15, 1942_

_AGED 27 YEARS_

In three years, David swore he had never seen that dedication before. He knew Bob Currie, from the automobile garage. He was odd and scatty and seemed to distress his father a great deal. And Moira often mentioned his wife, Gwen, who brought brownies to their church choir coffee mornings and always had a story to tell. He hadn’t any idea that they had once had a son. That they _had_ a son.

David looked at the engraving again. It was ten years today.

It was peacetime on Canadian soil, and David had never felt closer to war.


	4. Lance Corporal Dishonorable

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is the link to the playlist I've made for this fic, to listen as you read (if you like): [Pearls](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7nuz23X1JAAWVhXHrjcpzF?si=RSigT9FERguxyMUVbLVKXg)

When Patrick Brewer took his last life, he thought about the time he had saved his first.

It was summertime in Broaddus. A summer that Reverend Knightley had once told him, while chuckling deeply in his baritone boom of a voice, that he should get used to. A hot, sticky summer; the kind of summer that scared Patrick. There was an endlessness to it that scared him, but also a perishability to it, too; as though it might never leave, or it might leave tomorrow, and Patrick was never sure which thought made him more uneasy. Even after living through every extremity of the Korean Peninsula and dealing with the kind of sunburn that only comes from being hard at sea, Patrick had never experienced anything quite like the thick, swallowing, rippling heat of a South Texan August.

There was a dragonfly stuck between the rushes at the banks of the river next to his childhood home. He watched it struggle and squirm then go limp, squatting by the side of the creek as his friends splashed and wallowed in the rushing water. No matter how many times he returned to that riverside in his childhood to try and catch it out, it looked different every single time. Huge piles of rocks and sand were pushed downstream with every rainfall, cutting water off and letting new water in and covering and uncovering the whole area with varying amounts of smothering willow branches. Patrick could never understand how his friends enjoyed jumping in, putting even more rifts in the water than there already were. When he could find the rushes, he liked to sit amongst them on the banks and stare and stare into patches of water that weren’t moving at all. They looked like glass. He was afraid that dipping a finger in would fracture the whole creek. He stared so hard and for so long, wanting to hold onto the image of stillness for as long as possible.

The dragonfly was there on one particular day, gently knocking his peace to the side with a scrap of reality. He scooped it out, tipping the excess water from his palm. It was a small hand, soft and pale, but one that already knew the meaning of a hard day’s work at six years old. The dragonfly was stuck to his hand, its translucent purple wings matted with water, antennae stirring weakly. He blew on it once, twice, then even when he had lost hope for its survival he carried it slowly in his hand, letting the warm summer wind dry it off before he eventually dropped it back in the water. But he didn’t get the chance; for in the blink of an eye it was gone, as though it had remembered it could live, and would continue to live for the six weeks it did not know it had left.

“Ma, I saved a life today!” Patrick had said when he came home that night, and Marcy Brewer was washing the dried mud from his back and knees in the tin bathtub next to the fireplace in their farmhouse kitchen.

His mother gasped, in the way parents do when they know there is less weight to a sentence than their child implies. “You did? And just whose life did you save?”

“A dragonfly,” Patrick said. “It was purple. It was in the water and I picked it up.”

“Well, that was very merciful of you, wasn’t it? Are you going to tell God all about it on Sunday?”

Patrick nodded. “Mm-hm. But, but it’s like you said, He already knows. It was Him that made me do it, Ma.”

Marcy chuckled. “You’re a fine young man, Patrick Brewer.”

That was what he thought about when he stared at the lifeless form of the boy who had been running at him with wild, breakneck speed, a coerced mercilessness in his eyes that Patrick knew hadn’t been there at the start of the war. He knew because he saw it in his own, and knew that if he turned up at his mother’s doorstep tomorrow she’d cup his face in her hands and say “My sweet boy, whatever’s happened to you?”

That was what he thought about when he returned to camp that night and chanted the number two under his breath until his chest hurt and his mouth was agonizingly dry.

That was what he thought about when he saw the death toll of the Battle of Chosin Reservoir in an article in a magazine two years later, in a strange town with a stranger name. 48,156 casualties on the other side. Patrick stared at the number until it swam before his eyes. It looked bigger than Ray’s entire kitchen. _Two,_ Patrick thought. _Two of those were yours._ Without them, the number would have looked practically the same.

“I didn’t need to do it,” Patrick whispered. Ray glanced over at him from above his cup of coffee.

“Hm?”

“I didn’t need to. None of it, none of us needed to do any of it.”

Patrick chose not to look up and see Ray’s face. He didn’t need to.

“I’m going to…I’m going to go back to bed.”

* * *

_1941_

Patrick would never have traded his time with Rachel Catherine McArthur for anything in the world. It would be like trading in his childhood, trading in the things that made him Patrick. It would be like going back in time and ensuring that he was born without limbs if he got rid of that soothing, steady presence. But there was one thing he would change. There was one thing he desperately wanted to siphon like grease off the edges of his memory, and that was every second he had ever spent inside her house.

Rachel had nine siblings. Four older sisters and four younger brothers. By the time she was in her early teens, she had learned to draw comfort from the sight of a pregnant belly and mastered how to deal with what comes from one. He would lose her in there, lose her in a sea of feet and screams and Scots-red hair, and while she was swept up into sewing and cooking and the practice for the rest of her life Patrick would often end up ensnared by Rachel’s father and grandfather, stiff in their Sunday tweed in the large living room of the house.

That was how the Lord’s Day always ended up, with Patrick eating dinner at Rachel’s. For on the Lord’s Day, you did things in His glory. Things that would please Him. Her household was so big, with three-quarters of her grandparents living there as well as the remaining children, that one more mouth to feed barely went noticed by Edith, her wiry, harried mother. Patrick overall barely went noticed.

Rachel would feed her brothers after she’d fed herself, then clear everyone’s plates and wash up in the thorough, methodical way that only certain girls with certain mothers had learned how to do. Patrick would watch her. He liked the way she held the cutlery and crockery gently, cradling her mother’s homeware like each one was a babe. He watched her small, supple hands rub suds over the bowls and saw the way it calmed her down. But then Rachel’s grandfather would grunt and jerk his head towards the living room, a thick cigar bit down between his strong white teeth, and Patrick would follow him into the quiet, where the worst part of the afternoon began.

“Here. Have you heard? The Brits are calling for us to fight and we’ve accepted. About time. Did you hear this, boy?”

“Yes, sir. I did.”

“And will you be goin’ to fight, boy?”

“I’m too young, sir.”

“And how old are you, boy?”

“Seventeen, sir.”

“A fine enough age to be servin’ the country. You’re a strapping lad. What d’ya think, Matthew? Think he’s got it in him?”

Rachel’s father looked up, looked Patrick over like a prized cut of beef. “Hm. I’d give him a couple more years and say he’s good to go.”

Patrick tugged at the neck of his starched white shirt. There weren’t many things he hated, for his parents had given him no cause in the world to hate, but he hated Sundays. And he hated this house. He had no idea how Matthew and Matthew McArthur Sr. could sit for so long, reading the papers, clearing their throats and reading the papers again, the wind screaming in the chimney of the gray stone fireplace and the distant sounds of playing upstairs. When Patrick came home and told his parents the same things about his afternoons as he always did, he ran himself a bath and took off his clothes more slowly than he really wanted to, because he knew he would enjoy the releasing sensation of the warm water more if he’d been patient. He dipped a toe in first, letting the water sting before it settled into a pleasant, tingling heat, then rested his head back on the thick brim of the tub and closed his eyes.

As he got older, Patrick began to think that long, warm baths were probably the closest thing that the world had to a cure for the human condition. There were evenings where he could lie there until the water cooled and his father was knocking on the door impatiently, and even if he hadn’t reached for the knob of soap that always hardened onto the side of the bathtub Patrick knew he was cleansed, body and soul.

_And will you be goin’ to fight, boy?_

Patrick imagined himself in the field, in the air, on the shore. Defending the islands and never surrendering whatever the cost may be. He looked down at himself, bare and mottled in the hot water. The worst thing that had happened to his soft, pale body in seventeen years was a thick graze to the knee after he’d scraped it over some of his father’s farm machinery as a boy. His mother had plucked the gravel from his wound and scrubbed it over with carbolic and within a week it was gone. He lifted the knee now, the water resting in a sheen on top of his pebbled skin, and traced circles over it.

_You’re a strapping lad. What d’ya think, Matthew? Think he’s got it in him?_

Blood, toil, tears and sweat. His cousin George was fighting. He wrote to Patrick often, told him about the tea served in canisters and the brick that had once fell on his head. Patrick skated a delicate finger over his thin forearm, imagined it bulked up by a military life. He took the other forearm to his stomach, rubbing it up and down, feeling the beginnings of a strong, muscled core.

_I’d give him a couple more years and say he’s good to go._

Patrick laid there until he wondered why he was crying. It wasn’t like him to cry. He never even let himself do it in front of his mother. But the conversation today had upset him, though it was the kind of conversation that men had. The way they’d looked Patrick up and down like cattle to herd, how they’d discussed his going to war the same way they discussed how he’d be Rachel’s husband one day. He corrected the thought in his head: the same way they discussed how he’d be Rachel’s Husband one day. They had already approved the marriages of McArthur daughters to four doe-eyed young men, sat in the same armchair in their best suits, as Patrick was. Because their opinions mattered, they’d picked boys and packed boys up and deposited the remains of them in white picket houses up and down the town.

Just as much as he was Rachel’s Husband, she was Patrick’s Wife. And he mourned it. He knew her well enough to see her for all that she was, to know all her interests. She was intelligent. She wanted to study the sciences. She loved her home life, too, but Patrick sometimes suspected it was the same way a grandmother loved baking; she loved it because it was all she’d ever known, and all she’d ever done, and someone along the way had told her in not so many words that it was what she was meant to be doing all along.

Rachel’s parents couldn’t have afforded to send her to university even if the notion weren’t ridiculous to them. But Patrick’s could. Only a few blessed months after Rachel’s grandfather had made him cry, he went to Brown’s to study Business and Mathematics, avoiding the war altogether. His friends from home called it his ivory tower. It wasn’t _quite_ that, Patrick thought. More of an ivy tower, stone-clad and beautiful, full of growth and hope. The brown, wooden pubs, the peeling paper books under scattering willow trees. The tapping of brogues on thin stepping stones and woollen scarves wrapped round the high, smooth cheeks of young hopefuls. It had made him feel alive, to scrape chalk along giant blackboards and smoke cigarettes and perform in Shakespearean plays, red-kneed and savage and screaming, channelling something he did not understand through Hamlet, through Iago, through King John and Puck and, in one particularly enlightening performance, Lady Macbeth. He had plans for when he graduated to move to Edmonton to be near his paternal grandparents and start a job in consultancy or accounting, but then his parents started writing more and Rachel started writing more and John-Paul got married and Joey got married and Oliver got married and all of a sudden he was back home, back in his Sunday tweeds, again, and again, and again.

That was why he enlisted in the Marines. That was why he choked in relief at the solid, honorable excuse out of his hometown, even if the guilt of it made him pray harder. It hurt him, and it hurt his mother, but he needed to do it. He needed to wake up. He needed to do something with his hands. Maybe, just maybe, there was a grain of _something_ like Rachel’s principles of home burrowed in there. Maybe he’d sat for one too many Sundays with Matthew and Matthew Sr. and heard them talking about war like that was all a young boy was good for. Maybe he needed war like Rachel needed children, like a grandmother needed to bake.

On Patrick’s twenty-fourth birthday, Clint Brewer took two days off from the farm to drive him to California. His mother refused to go. She told him that if she saw him stood in front of Camp Pendleton, his back to her and his eyes to the sky, she’d simply have to drag him straight back home. One look from his father while they were sat in the old, rust-colored truck stationed just outside the camp told Patrick that he felt the same way. But it was springtime in Broaddus. There were lettuces to plant and fields to till. He had to turn around at some point, whether he had Patrick in tow or not.

Patrick entered the gates of Camp Pendleton at the same time as a boy who made his eyes widen against his will, for the boy looked exactly like him. He’d never met such a doppelgänger in his life. They had the same chestnut curls, the same soft eyes, the same thin-lipped smile. They were both wearing their tweeds. Patrick looked at the boy and the boy looked at Patrick and they both burst out laughing, not stopping until the boy’s iron-solid veteran of a father clipped him around the head. It shut Patrick up as well.

The last he saw of the boy was when they were sat together on reclining metal benches, a mockery of the comfort of a barber’s chair, looking into each other’s eyes as they had their chins jerked back like sheep and their soft, shining curls were shorn from their heads.

****

Patrick’s first leave came six months later in time for Thanksgiving. The thought of returning home, even for a week, and letting the four hundred people of his small, small town see the change in him, galvanised him in a way for which he had no words and even less of an explanation. His mother burst into tears at the loss of his hair, which he had already learned to keep tamed with his very own pair of electric clippers. Rachel’s grandfather cracked his very first smile. Rachel did the opposite.

“Patrick…” she said carefully, brokenly, once her family had dispersed and they were left alone in her room. The attic ceiling of it was slanted, and the midday November sun beat them round the face through her lace curtains, hot and headachy. “Patrick, what are you doing?”

“What?” he said roughly, as though he had any idea himself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Paddy, this isn’t like you! I know you wanted to get away to university, but this? What’s happened to you?”

“Happened to me?” Patrick retorted, almost spitting the words out. “It’s more like what’s _not_ happened to me, Rachel. I just feel – trapped. All the time. And I don’t know why.”

Rachel looked wounded, but the hurt soon lost out to firm, familial pride. “We’ve tried so hard with you, Paddy. I’ve tried so hard. Is this not enough for you? Am – am I not enough for you?”

“No, no, Rachel, don’t say that. You’re enough, you are more than enough, but…”

“But?”

_You’re too enough. Too final. I am full of this house, full of its skirting boards and its plum trees. I am the wind that spins the dial on the roof, the cracks in the fence; I sit as ash on the fireplace. I need sweeping away, I need to be able to walk into a house once more and call it my own without worrying I’ll be demolished where I lie._

“I just need to go. I can’t stay.”

“Just tell me why, Patrick!”

“Why should I stay?” he shouted.

“Oh, because it’s _easy!”_ Rachel was hysterical, one hand crinkling her skirt in a tight, damp clutch, the other fretting at her beautiful red hair. “Please. It’s fine. We have all we need here. We should be lucky.”

Patrick only shook his head. “I can’t.” Then, because he knew it might be the last time, he took Rachel’s hands tightly and kissed them over and over. “Promise me. Promise me that you’ll –”

Rachel hiccoughed, her face streaming. “That I’ll what?”

But he didn’t know. He didn’t know at all.

The day after he returned, Patrick was thrown back into drills and practicals and he wondered why he was doing it at all, wondered who he was serving. One of the Marines asked him why he was walking around tripping over his own face. Patrick shrugged and said, “I packed things in with my girl back home, is all.” The Marine had clapped him on the shoulder sympathetically, and started talking about a girlfriend he’d broken up with because she was obsessed with the stars from the city and wanted to move there to try and be like one of them. “Not that it’d work for her,” the Marine said. “Girl had a face like a mule!”

Patrick laughed at him. The story was lighthearted, it was nothing, and Patrick was a little glad to have something in common with at least one person here. He fell into a bit more of a routine, one he folded himself up inside like a parcel, delivering himself as a new person to the feet of social expectation. He could spit and curse and eat fast with his whole forearm tucked around his bowl like them. And, after a while, he actually started to enjoy it. Even if, deep down, he still questioned his purpose here every night, he liked to let himself get lost in the careful, disciplined marching back from practice, the South Californian sun rippling around the Marine base, making everything glow as dark orange as a baked peach. It was on a day like that that Patrick had seen a figure in the distance, perched on the ledge of a bridge. For all the absurdity of it, Patrick hadn’t forgotten. Within an instant of seeing him, Patrick’s mind had jumped to one hundred conclusions, the most prominent of them being that the man was going to throw himself off the bridge. Patrick pinched the skin on the wrist of Terry, the man to his left who’d become something of a friend, in the form of a silent, alerting communication they’d developed between practices. Terry looked up and saw the man, too.

“He’s fine,” Terry whispered. “Look, there’s a man pulling up beside him.”

The heat and dust cleared and Patrick saw the man in full, realizing with relief that he was just sitting and watching the troop pass by. He was dressed in an outfit that made Patrick jealous because the weather was so hot. His white loafers buckled with gold, white dress pants that didn’t quite reach his ankles and pale pink shirt made Patrick’s hot tunic cling to him even more than it already was. A pair of black aviators were hanging in the crook of his shirt, the same color as the glinting Rolex on his wrist.

“Gee look at him. Think he’s an Italian?” Terry said, his voice still breathy to stay quiet.

Patrick glanced again. He certainly had the look of a European. His black hair swept upwards away from his face, the same height as Patrick’s own curls had once been, though he was hard-pressed for a reason to believe he could ever have looked half as glamorous. The scruff on his chin was meticulously maintained, as close and trimmed as the thick eyebrows that framed a black, scrutinizing gaze.

“I think he looks like that husband Judy Garland had,” Patrick responded. “You know, the one with the swept-up hair –”

“What, David Rose?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. He’s like David Rose with black hair.”

Terry chuckled. “Hm. Yeah, I see that.”

Patrick and Terry passed by him and didn’t look back again. That would have earned them a kick to the back of the ankles from one of the more boorish, focused men in their troop, the kinds whose forefathers had fought at Yorktown and set off a line of sons destined to lose at least a bit of themselves in action.

“Terry. Pst.”

“Hm?”

“Terry!”

“I’m here, what’s wrong?”

Patrick huffed out and turned in his cot, leaning on an elbow. Terry, looking equally sleepless, stared back from across the small dorm.

“I was just thinking about that man today,” Patrick said.

“The clothes-y one? What about him?”

“What if he really had been tryin’ to jump?”

Terry thought about it.

“I don’t know. Would we have had to save him?”

“Should we have at least checked to see if he wasn’t gonna do it?”

“Nah, the other man was there. He’ll have been fine.”

“If you say so. G’night, Terry.”

“G’night, Patrick.”

No matter what Terry said, Patrick couldn’t get the figure out of his mind. It wasn’t so much the man himself, but what he could have been. What he could be. Though Patrick was convinced now that the man wasn’t about to jump, he knew there were a hundred before him and there would be a hundred after him who made a different decision. And Patrick was overcome with a bright, spurring desire to give them all a reason to live.

He didn’t sleep that night. He was stuck in the moment of finally realizing he had a purpose here, a purpose beyond the need to get out of Broaddus. He trained harder and marched harder until he felt his calves firming and soon he was the one kicking the back of the ankles of the men who were slacking in front. He trained and lifted and ran and ate and slept and got out of bed so fast it made him dizzy and shut his goddamned mouth so help him until he was Lance Corporal Patrick Brewer of the First Division of the US Marines. A modest position, but still one to write home about.

* * *

_1951_

“Would you like to tell me a little bit about this?”

Dr. Harner was looking at Patrick’s right foot. The whole lower leg, to be precise, as Patrick squeezed and unsqueezed the muscles from knee to heel in an irregular beat that didn’t match the clock. As soon as he said it, Patrick stopped. He shook the leg out.

“Oh, I…um. I think if I did, you’d be offended, doctor.”

Dr. Harner frowned in concentration. “Hm…you weren’t counting down the seconds to the end of the appointment in your head, were you?”

Patrick laughed nervously. “That…may be right.”

The doctor smiled and crossed his own legs as he flipped to a fresh leaf of paper in his notebook. “I thought as much. I do it myself when I’m somewhere I don’t want to be.”

“I do want to be here,” Patrick said automatically. Dr. Harner raised an eyebrow at him.

“You don’t have to pretend that’s true,” he said. There was something so earnest and open about him that it made Patrick relax immediately, even if his dissecting stare did sometimes make Patrick feel like the man was swallowing down parts of his soul that Patrick himself was barely even acquainted with.

Dr. Harner started making notes in his book, looking up at Patrick every so often as though he was sketching a portrait of him.

“I do it in eights,” Patrick said. “With my leg. I count down from one hundred and count eight real seconds in between with the squeezes.”

“Ah, pretending you have more time left than you do. Clever. Is there anywhere else you employ the trick?”

“I used to do it at work when I was a kid,” Patrick said. “There was a big clock in the factory that I was sat right under.”

“Where did you work?”

“Rose Telecommunications. I used to bend the same kink into the same wire on the conveyor belt for every hour of my shift.” Patrick remembered the loose chain in the factory breakroom lavatory and the way the metal would smudge his fingers silver. He could remember the taste of his lunchtime sandwiches, and how the cucumber would seep into the bread and make it soggy. They weren’t bad memories. Working was a meditation he could lose himself in easily.

“Anywhere else?”

“Um…” Patrick thought about it. He thought about ticking grandfather clocks and ticked-off grandfathers and _will you be going to fight, boy?_ “I used to do it on Sundays, in the sitting room of the family I ate dinner with.”

“That doesn’t sound as bad as a shift at work. What was so unappealing about them that you felt like you wanted to get out?”

That was something Patrick had never discussed with anyone before, not even himself. He’d once shared a laugh with his friend Joey about being stuck with the old man on a Sunday, but Joey’s stories always had a color of fondness that Patrick was sure he wouldn’t be able to dredge up even if he’d stuck his fingers down his throat and forced it out.

“Everything,” Patrick said, and he realized for the first time that it really was. “It was everything. I didn’t like how settled in I felt. I didn’t like how they looked over me as though I was meant to be there. One day Rachel just brought me home and suddenly my life was…wrapped up in them all. I was stuck in a rut of days that made me feel like the rest of my life had started already.”

Dr. Harner scrawled faster. “You’ve mentioned Rachel before. A girlfriend, you say?” He sounded surprised.

“Yes, a girlfriend,” Patrick said firmly. “And then a fiancée, briefly. Because I – I…”

“Yes?”

Patrick could hardly bear it. There was so much space between the doctor’s words, so much dead, silent, white space that Patrick felt his soul reaching out with its shaking fingers, licking at the corners of it to fill out his explanations. Of course, that was what Harner wanted. He wanted Patrick to come to the conclusions, wanted Patrick to answer it because, sometimes, the only trustworthy voice is one’s own.

“Because that’s what you do. That’s what comes next. Oh God, I can’t – Rachel…”

And again, just like every week, a little more of Patrick’s world fell away beneath the chair in Dr. Harner’s office. It was his fourth of six scheduled meetings, ones he had been shoved into when he was forced back to California from Korea all by himself with hardly any room to breathe. But he could cry here, which was something. Dr. Harner was used to people who cried. He was used to people who came in and laid on the floor in anguish, used to people who needed to be convinced they were real, used to people who felt so alien in their skin that there were many appointments to be made outside the office, too.

“Patrick, I want you to know that I’m just like you,” Dr. Harner said, placing a firm, comforting palm on Patrick’s knee. “And one of the senior doctors knows. That’s why he chose me to talk to you. You’re safe here, you can say whatever you’d like.”

“I’m not – I’m not, I’m not like you. We’re not the same. It was all a big misunderstanding.”

The doctor did not believe a shred of it, and Patrick could see it in his sad eyes. Perhaps he wished for things to be different. Perhaps he saw himself in Patrick, though Patrick could hardly imagine why, because he was still forcing himself to pretend that he had no idea what ‘just like you’ meant.

The appointments ended as slowly as they had begun. Dr. Harner said that he was sorry to see him go from the perspective of a friend, _because Patrick, you’re really quite a good conversationalist, you know._ And Patrick had said, “Dr. Harner, I do wish I could put that to good use.”

“You can,” the doctor said, though he looked at the blue ticket in Patrick’s hands like it was a brick wall between the Marine and God’s Great Plan. “You go start all those businesses, Patrick.”

Patrick knew he couldn’t go home. He had known it from the moment he was discharged. For if he went home, he would have to tell them why he had had to leave active service, and he would have to get married and hide behind white pickets for the rest of his life.

He wrote letters until his hands cramped to his parents, to Rachel, to his friends and to the Reverend to let them know he wouldn’t be returning to Broaddus for a while. He took them to a black shining post office near the hostel he was inhabiting in the city of Oceanside. While he was licking the stamps and picking an orange soda from the ice bucket outside the building, he caught sight of a truck rental across the road. The trucks were old and rusted and reminded him of his father’s. After sending the letters, Patrick crossed over the road, then haggled with the grizzled rental owner and stretched out his meagre L.C. earnings to the very last cent so he could buy, not rent, a faded blue truck and a hefty can of petrol.

Patrick couldn’t go home, but he could do his best. Canada was a good start, since that had been his plan back in university. Not Edmonton, nor its concrete and its deep freezes. He was looking for somewhere he could pull overripe blackberries off their bushes, the plump seeds crumbling to juice and staining his fingers, in the same way his hypothetical children might have done. He was looking for a place where he could scoop dragonflies from the water and save their lives. It was his own life that needed saving this time. His eyes, his heart, his soul was as fragile and lucent as wings, and some nights he would lie awake wondering if he might flutter away.

‘Creek’ was what caught his eye before its lewd-sounding prefix. That sounded like the place he needed to be. The winter was setting in hard now anyway and driving all day and night had him cold and uncomfortable. He bought himself a beer from the brand-new bar on the outskirts of the town, then he bought a new fleeced jacket from the haberdashery, pleading with the scatty, grey-haired owner to keep the store open for just a minute more while he selected one. He spent one night in the rundown roadside motel, and he juggled with the idea of staying, but after one night of listening to the incessant, reedy screeching of two upper-class, transatlantic accents and another male voice shouting at them to shut up, Patrick decided he couldn’t take it anymore.

He knew the town well before a week had barely passed. He had scouted it out, stamping a border into the dust with his sharp, devil-dog march, a kind of walk that disintegrated by the end of the road, sunk away from his essence until his steps were tattered things, no more than the inelegant stumbling of a careless boy. But whether stumbled or marched, he had learned every inch of the place in a handful of days and nights. He knew the scrapyard and had climbed the pile of outworn scythes and tires several times, once causing a rusting aluminium barrel to fall off the pile, screeching and biting as it clanged to the ground. It had made him laugh. He knew the wheat fields and could find with ease the single sunflower that stood in the middle of the field to the east of the town. He wondered who had planted it. There were old, tangled wires hanging from the side of the diner, the remnants of a public telephone, and there were damp middens and rotten hay by the back entrance of the old general store, which backed onto a meagre pen that was home to a dusty, sunken-eyed horse.

The last time he had ventured into town, a passer-through had stuck their head out of their car and called for Patrick. He turned to them. They were a man and woman, overdressed for the heat, and the way the dust refused to cling to the sides of their vehicle gave Patrick the impression that it had never been dirty.

“Say, where would we find a refill for the car around here?” the woman said.

Patrick went blank for a moment before the answer hit him, like the moments of study in university where he was convinced that he remembered nothing seconds before he entered the examination hall.

“If you take a left and then back down the way you came, you’ll pass by Bob’s Automobile Garage,” Patrick explained, the words falling off his tongue like a local. “With the way you came up the first time, you probably missed it.”

“Cheers, son,” the man said. The car thrummed to life again and they drove the way Patrick had told them.

He blinked after it. Those people, whoever they were, would go the rest of their lives with the image of Patrick embedded in their heads as a “boy who lives here”. And for the first time, he felt something close to right.

That night, he returned to Ray’s with a clearer head. He copied his new housefellow’s evening rituals. He took up the newspaper and read about the Ottawa Rough Riders winning their fourth Grey Cup, ate his first full plate of dinner, and found for the first time in a couple of months that Waltzing Matilda was not stuck in his head. In its place was the swishing of waves, gentle and muted, the sound more akin to that of pressing a shell to one’s ear rather than the gnashing he had known on the Samcheok coast.

He must have been giving off some altered kind of air, for when Ray had given him his coffee the next morning on the stairs, he seemed like he was impressed when Patrick descended into the kitchen instead of retreating back to his room. It was about time he started pushing the formless blobs of his days into more discernible shapes. He supposed Ray must have been relieved at this new emergence, too, for sometimes Patrick neglected to bathe or brush his teeth and he could feel the grime sitting on him as much as he was sure Ray could smell it.

‘Because of You’ was tinkling out from the radio, and Patrick was surprised to find his knee moving up and down in relative time with the music. Not military time, not marching time, but simply to the scoops and swells of Tony Bennett’s enthusiastic band. Then Ray came in from his office, a hopeful smile on his face.

“I thought you should know that we’ll be having a guest over for dinner tonight! One of my new clients is going to be joining us. I do hope you and him will get along, wouldn’t it be lovely for you to make a friend here!”

Patrick stopped bobbing his leg. He felt his face tighten, felt his chest close up.

“Thanks for letting me know,” he said curtly, then made his way back upstairs. The Waltzing Matilda started playing once again in his head.

After a day of staring out the window, dressing and redressing in various items of clothing and sleeping, Patrick woke up to the familiar evening sounds of running water and hollow pots being pulled haphazard from the cupboards. He flushed his tired face with cold water and sat down at the desk in his room. He was writing a poem when Ray came to the door around half an hour later. The heat had dropped in the room and he was still crouched over the desk in his dressing gown, scribbling away.

_To sleep, alone, to sleep_

_On shimmering sand that gently weeps_

_Away beneath my feet_

_To shun, to sigh, to see no more_

_The ~~red bleak~~ bleak red battlements they ~~bare~~ bear you for_

_To see a life unscarred, unworn_

_Love, I would give most things_

_To witness air that gently rings_

_In a day of pure, holy nothing –_

“Knock knock,” Ray said gently. “Our guest will be coming soon if you’d like to come downstairs to dine with us. If you’ve changed your mind, that’s perfectly fine.”

Patrick dredged up half a smile. “It’s okay, I’ll come.”

Ray smiled and gave Patrick a thumbs-up before leaving the room again. Patrick turned around and read back through the poem but found that he did not like it anymore. He sighed, shed his dressing gown, and made his way downstairs into the living room. Someone knocked on the door, and he felt sick all of a sudden. As though someone he wasn’t meant to see was stood on the other side of the door. As though this person would hurt him, distress him in some way, throw some puzzle piece of his life off-kilter until he was standing all askew like a paper doll ripped in half by a petulant child.

“Ah, David! I’m so glad you’ve come. You two can sit yourselves down in the living room while I put the final touches on dinner.”

Patrick sat still as David toed into the room like he was entering an enclosure. He tapped his knuckle on the door. Until David had sat himself down in Ray’s armchair, Patrick stayed stock-still.

When the man sat down, Patrick’s gut twisted again; not with dread, but this time recognition. He had no idea why, for he was certain he had never seen anyone like this in his life, not least in this town. This town was certainly not one that looked home to such perfectly greased-up hair, such unusual high-end clothing, the likes of which he had only ever caught glimpses of in Rachel’s fashion magazines.

David. There was something about reconciling his name with the sweep of that hair, with the way he perched on the seat with his heels together and knees apart, clapping the heels of his hands awkwardly and bunching up his mouth into the corner of his cheeks. There was something about it that made Patrick think about marching and the Californian sun.

“How long have you been staying with Ray, Patrick?”

Little else passed through Patrick’s head after that. He looked at David again, and there was something about the voice that completed the image, though he had never heard it before. His voice was silver, timeless, weighted down by a humbleness that was as fresh as new skin and _oh my God, it’s him._

Patrick re-dressed him in his mind’s eye. White slacks. A pink shirt decorated with black aviators.

It was the man on the bridge.

The one who had kept him awake.

The concept of whom that had stopped him from requesting a discharge when he was still wet behind the ears in terms of military experience.

He was alive, he was living. He was asking stupid questions about business and Patrick couldn’t look at him, _God,_ he couldn’t _bear_ to look at him because he was afraid he would see something that wasn’t worth the trouble. He was afraid of this man.

“I want to go to bed, Ray.”

And he did. Patrick pushed his chair away, silently promising he would eat more of Ray’s food tomorrow. He had been doing so well.

He got himself ready for bed as perfunctorily as he did back in service, leaving no time in between to stare in the mirror or force his way through a letter. He closed his bedroom window, almost catching his thumb on the thick sash border, and clamped the stiff levers down hard.

And he got into bed as quickly as he had got out of it one day last week, when, for some inexplicable reason, he had woken up far earlier than he had done all month, got dressed in his dirty, outworn Marines uniform, ran downstairs to start the meeting that Ray had encouraged him to take over last minute – some Mr. Rose who’d bought the lots on Main Street – and sat there for five full minutes before he realized what he had done.

“Ray, why did I put on my uniform?”

“What do you – Patrick, are you alright? Why are you wearing that?”

Patrick looked down at the mud-crusted boots and the white shirt that was still stained gray in places with old sweat. He launched himself out of his seat quickly, as though if he did it fast enough he might leave that version of him sitting there, leave the vestige of it rumpled like a bodysuit in the chair.

“I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m not ready for this Ray, I can’t…”

“It’s alright, Patrick – no, Patrick, don’t cry. You’ll be alright. Let me take over the meeting again.”

On his way to the floor, he managed to upset Ray’s wastepaper basket and several of the sheets of plain paper he kept on the side of the desk. Without knowing why, Patrick took the smooth papers and crumpled them as well, so that he was awash in a sea of it.

The front door swung wide, then very quickly closed again. The wind must have blown it open.


	5. Workshop Receipts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Hello! I'm back to posting this one after a bit of a break. I can't promise I'll be entirely consistent with posting, as life is getting a bit busier at the moment. Nevertheless, I'm still thoroughly enjoying writing this.
> 
> \- Here is the link to the playlist I've made for this fic, to listen as you read (if you like): [Pearls](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7nuz23X1JAAWVhXHrjcpzF?si=RSigT9FERguxyMUVbLVKXg)

Once again, David had the same dream he had been having since he came to Schitt’s Creek. He dreamt he was at the gates of Rose Manor again, as though he had stayed behind when his family left. Like always, he could not enter the gnarled steel gates for the dense padlock and chain strangling them like bindweed, the metal so thick and biting it was almost melded with the gate. Like always, the once-lush trees that sang a merry path up to the grand house gaped like open wounds, leaving much more space behind the rose petals that were stuck atop the rusted spokes of the gate, so that moonlight coated the sight like cold sugar and left far too little to the imagination.

In the dream, he would walk towards it and see the faces of his old life embedded in the path below him, faces that crunched underfoot as muted and mulchy as damp leaves. He saw Reverend Simmons, the choirmaster at Eton. He saw Maurice Charles, the captain of the Upper Sixth cricket team who had snuck into David’s boarding room every night for a week to roll around with him before he quite abruptly made fun of his accent, left, and was never seen again until graduation. He saw friends. His sister’s sketchy friends, his mother’s false friends, his father’s leering, shark-like friends. When he stepped on them, David felt like his heart was rocketing to his head then plummeting to his feet.

The air fluttered with dry leaves and the unsettling blank softness of moths instead of the swift, keening chatter of swallows and woodpeckers that David remembered of his youth. They were drawn to it, drawn to the light of the moon and the single candle that flickered in every window of the decrepit Rose Manor, a vigil so still and tense that David always thought something might jump out at him if he blinked. He was always sure that something _did_ jump out at him, but it was at that part of the dream that he always woke up, blinking and hungry and cold.

Sometimes, it made him feel like a boy again, waking up just before dawn like that. But he supposed it was just an after-effect of the dream. The last time he had ever considered Rose Manor to be anything like a home was long before they left for Schitt’s Creek. It was long, too, before he left for boarding school.

He had a remedy for bad dreams when he was living there. It was to wander around his wing of the manor until the sun rose and the sour taste of his own mouth drew him to the dining hall, where he would ring for cold ham and quiche, cranachan and croissants. He had a remedy for bad dreams in New York, too, and that was to stave away the feeling by pressing himself tighter to his bed partners or stuffing his nose and lungs full of things that would have made his rabbi sigh with disappointment if he hadn’t stopped going to the synagogue in the ‘40s.

Here, there was little to do. It was ironic, really, that the way he used to handle his nightmares was the very thing that became one, all these years later. Thinking about the chaos of his former life, the nothing-good of it all, would sometimes occupy his mind all day.

The room was still. David slipped on his usual Oxfords and wrapped a long jacket over his shoulders before opening the motel door, quietly so as not to wake Alexis, then stepped out into the winter chill.

The sun was stirring weakly behind the frosted walls of the sky, a half-baked promise to try and warm up the rest of the day. David didn’t listen to it, and pulled his coat tighter.

Just like he did before his first meeting at Ray’s, before the town that had become an unexpected sort of haven was once again tinged with the uncertainty of war and strange people, David made his way to the edges of town, to the large billboard that stood at the foot of a future estate. He stared at it once more, stared at the family, and rocked on the back of his shoes so he could feel the pearls.

“It’s not gonna work.”

The sound took a moment to reach David’s ears. When it did, he jumped hard in a delayed reaction. He almost thought about letting the comment go ignored, whatever it meant, but it intrigued him. He wanted to know what wasn’t going to work.

Plus, there was no one else around here that sounded quite like that.

He turned around slowly and met the gaze of the person he had known he was going to see, the owner of the softest voice in the world. It was a little louder here, as though the fog and the mist had sharpened it up and it was carried to David on the rolling cloud of ice that had been expelled from Patrick’s mouth when he breathed. Like he was at home in the outdoors.

Patrick Brewer looked him up and down, and David thought he almost saw him smirk at David’s pyjamas, the irony of it. For all the early hours of the morning, Patrick had managed to dress himself this time, and David found himself feeling absurdly proud. Patrick looked less tired, too. Less out of his element. He was wearing a soft blue pullover with a white collar beneath and brown corduroy slacks. His shoes, however, were those big, chunky things that David had last seen flailing at the end of him on Ray’s floor.

David was confused. He had thought Patrick was afraid of him. No, he _knew_ Patrick was afraid of him, and he had _thought_ Patrick might hate him, too. But still, intrigue, deep intrigue, led him forwards. David broke the silence that followed first, his own voice like an auger that drilled a fishing hole into ice, breaking the thick space that had grown and hardened between them in those few, long moments. “Um. What – what won’t work?”

Immediately, Patrick raised two fingers to the billboard, to the family and the distant house that had been painted, David thought, in a rather Gogh-esque way. “Doin’ the houses up like that. The terrain round here’s all wrong, they need to be more unique.”

David looked at Patrick appraisingly, took in his worker hands and thick thighs. They were like tree trunks. David rolled his lips inwards to suppress an absurd laugh at the comparison he had made. Thankfully, Patrick did not notice.

David took two steps backwards, then three, until they were side by side and staring up at the sign together. “So, what would you do? Given the chance.”

Patrick’s head turned, and David could see the warmth of his golden-brown eyes from the corner of his own, could feel the gentle heat of them. It was too much. Far too much. He had to look back, to meet his eyes. When he did, he found himself having to swallow a sudden lump in his throat that had begun to constrict his breathing. The intensity of Patrick’s stare, it pushed and pulled at the edges of him. It burrowed deep inside and started breathing heavily inside him, like a creature hiding itself in the cave of his stomach. David tried to coax it out, but it was no use. He had to tear his eyes back to the billboard just so that smooth, pale skin, that auburn scruff, those _eyes_ did not kill him.

Patrick cleared his throat and sniffed, scrubbing a finger under his nose as he did. It sounded a little wet, like the cold morning air was getting to him and he needed to blow his nose. “I, uh…I wouldn’t line the houses like they have on the ground over there.” He gestured to the chalk and long, thin fingers of wood that were dividing the terrain into squares. “I’d build up some of the ground first, give the houses more lawn rather than a street down the middle of the estate. Maybe some of them could be built up onto higher ground, too. Get some compost and create grass mounds, pack ‘em down so that they…”

Patrick faltered, and when David turned to him he laughed nervously. He actually _laughed,_ and it took David a minute to reconcile this man with the kind of sound he had never expected to hear from him. “Sorry. I’m ramblin’ about houses now.”

David bit down hard on his lip, though he wasn’t entirely sure why. “Well, seeing as that’s what I invited you to do, I’m not exactly complaining.”

Patrick laughed again, and it was real this time. David felt his brain hot-wiring. What was happening? It was all so surreal being here, as the sun broke the freezing mold of the sky, with this short, quiet man. This man, who had drifted in and out of David’s waking conscious like a ghost for nearly two weeks and disturbed his peace by simply existing here. There was a pull to him, a minute magnetic drive that David could barely explain, but knew it had something to do with those eyes and that voice; that sweet, Texan drawl that David wanted nothing more than to hear say something else. He wanted to hear it talk with passion, to rear up and overhead, away from the town and into realms of ambition and hope and peacetime. And if David could not have that, not ever, then he was happy to settle for houses. More than happy, even.

“So, you’re a builder, too?” David prompted.

Patrick’s mouth downturned into a frown that was more like a sheepish little smile. “I was goin’ to be, I think. If I hadn’t gone to college. My pa has a farm back ho– back in Texas, and I used to help with the…”

Patrick faltered again, but there was something about the way his eyes fixed glassily on the middle distance that David knew he would not be getting much more out of him this time. Perhaps he’d pressed just a little too hard on the soft, unshielded underbelly that all humans have, the part that no one but a life partner can touch. And time and experience had told David that to spend his life with a solitary human being was something so far out of the cards for him that the thought barely even landed anymore.

David crooked his elbows and brought his hands up to either side of his chest in the way he had picked up from his sister. He pushed his chin up and closed his eyes, as though he were flapping away everything he just said and turning over a whole new page. “Okay. Um. You don’t want to – get some breakfast at the diner, or anything, do you –”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

And as quickly as he had come, he was gone. David had to press his hands to his eyes and scrub hard a few times as he stared at the blank space where Patrick had just been, walking back to town in a precise, military march that reminded David of an evening on the overpass in 1949. He wondered if Patrick had been one of those Marines he had seen.

****

“Well, if that wasn’t the absurdest darn thing you’ve ever done, Brewer.”

Patrick hoped David hadn’t heard him mutter to himself as he walked away, but he also hoped that he had. He walked quickly, and walked efficiently, cutting through the hard path and its dust in the way he had been taught. But strangely he was not at all distressed, or uncomfortable, or feeling anything like he might have done if he’d approached David in that way a few weeks ago, when the thought of him being here was still stabbing at the edges of his dreams.

Patrick had been feeling bold when he saw David pass Ray’s front window. He had been sat there since five in the morning, dressing gown wrapped tight with a few consecutive cups of tea clutched in his hands or on the table.

It was getting lighter outside quicker these days. The winter had been hard, but it was fast, and spring had begun to shuffle in with its tail between its legs, an apology for its nasty brother winter opening on its lips like the crocuses that were starting to open in Ray’s hanging baskets.

At first, Patrick hadn’t been at all sure that it was David he was seeing walking along the street, until he caught the glint of black hair and the sight of those same shoes that tipped oddly at the back as though they had stones stuck in them. It was strange to be the one sitting and watching the march, when he had been marching with David watching not so long ago. He wondered if David remembered. And, if so, he wondered how vague the memory was. He wondered if David would ever know what it had meant to think of him on that bridge, not so much the appearance or the beauty of him – though, Patrick couldn’t deny, he was _very_ beautiful – but the thought of all the Americans and Canadians who hated the world, or hated themselves, or both. All the people he wanted to protect. David had been all of them in that moment.

And Patrick had seen him from the window and was filled with a peculiar kind of strength, one he had not felt since the moment after he had managed to push his father’s pitchforked truck out of the slick summer mud for the first time, caked up to the eyes with dirt but feeling strong and confident in the aftermath. Like he could do anything. And Patrick decided that if he could see David from the window, he could follow him. And if he could follow him, then he could talk to him like he was any old person, and not someone who had unknowingly changed his life in 1949. If he applied his own logic to the situation, David _was_ any old person, really. The any old person he spent months in Korea fighting for.

He’d managed about a hundred words. Not that he’d been counting. It was meagre by the standards of the stories he’d spin at Camp Pendleton for his amused friends, and by the standards of an old Patrick who would holler and scream on the baseball pitch at home, but it was something. So when he walked away, he had felt the very first tinge of _good enough for now_ that he had felt ever since he got here.

When he came back to Ray’s, _Swinging on a Star_ was playing on the radio. Ray was bobbing around the kitchen as usual, and Patrick felt a rush of fondness as he listened to Ray singing along to the funny lyrics that seemed to suit his (surprisingly good) voice and general demeanor.

“Would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar, and be better off than you are? Or would you rather be a mule – oh, Patrick! I was wondering where you’d got to.”

Patrick nodded in greeting. “Just a little morning walk, Ray.”

Ray smiled proudly. He was doing that more and more these past few weeks, at every sign that Patrick was starting to peel back the layers of dark that had grown on him like lime. On some of the bad days, Patrick reminded himself of the figure his mother had made him grow up with as a warning to come back inside before it got too cold and dangerous outside. Dark Dicky, she called him, and he was kind of like the Bogeyman. “If you don’t come back from the river before nightfall, Dark Dicky will come down to get you,” she said, in a warning tone that wasn’t really a warning at all. “He comes out at night and eats little Patricks for supper.” And Patrick would giggle, and he would feel safe anyway, because more often than not Patrick already wanted to be back at home long before dark.

There was a Dark Patrick who would come out at night, cloaked and hooded and not at all like himself, like he had been swapped out for his shadow at dusk. It was the Patrick that sweated through his bedsheets and thrashed on the floor. But slowly and slowly, he and Ray were working together to tamp him down, and when the Dark came out unavoidably, they made a point to sit down and talk about it.

It was this peeling back of layers that gave Ray the confidence to broach the topic of work again that very day, the same day that Patrick had already confronted one of the corners of his past when he approached David Rose and finally managed to convince himself that David was real, he was here. The first time Patrick had tried to work had been early, much too early, and the wires of business and war had become crossed in his head and he’d ended up sitting on the floor in the worst spell he’d had since he arrived in Schitt’s Creek. But since then, Ray had washed his uniform, and Patrick had folded it up, quiet and tight, and made space for it at the very, very back of his wardrobe.

“There are plenty of jobs opening up in town at this time of year, what with new businesses starting and the estate being built,” Ray said as he piled three sausages and an egg onto Patrick’s plate. “Roland and the council are putting notices out for all the freelancers that can be relied on throughout the year. If it’s not too much of an imposition, I’d like to put your name in for as many as there are.”

Patrick looked up and smiled. “Thank you, Ray,” he said gratefully, and he meant it.

“There’s much to be said for taking on as many jobs as possible,” Ray went on, gesturing to a business license he had in front of him on the table and then to the paint-splattered cloth sitting on the kitchen counter, where he had been sat until late last night decorating rubber ducks. “Is there anything in particular you’d like to try your hand at?”

Patrick thought about the houses, and how some gut instinct had told him that they weren’t supposed to look at all like they did on the advertising billboard. He also thought about David. He opened the glass jar of ketchup on the table, stuck a butter knife inside and scooped some out, smearing it onto his plate by the sausages, still piping hot and glistening brown and pink in the bright kitchen light.

“If you can put me in for something manual, I’d be game,” Patrick said. That was why he had enlisted, after all. He needed to do something with his hands. To feel like he was doing something of his own volition.

Ray stuck two thumbs up and smiled broadly. “Great!”

Patrick smiled as Ray jogged out of the room, singing along to another silly song on the radio, _Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree._ He was glad Ray was feeling more himself, too. Patrick was more willing, now, to endure the enthusiastic-to-a-fault happiness that Ray had tried to plaster on him in the first few weeks before he learned better. Come to think of it, he was willing for a lot more things than he had been at the start of the year. Well, technically, the end of last year, but he didn’t really count that one as a year at all. 1951 was something he didn’t think he’d ever be able to think about again without curling up and crying, crying, _crying,_ so he locked it up just a little. He locked it up and thought about what had happened to make him spring so suddenly out of the fugue state he had been trapped in. He wasn’t sure, but he thought it wore odd shoes.

* * *

_Corfu, 1942_

* * *

There were few things more peaceful and personal, David thought, than to eat a peach outside in the sun.

It was a low sun today; low, but not deep, and not quite orange. Not just yet. It was flirting with the edge of the sea, and David knew he had at least another hour before the champagne glint of it softened and darkened into the hot, oven red of evening. There had been three consecutive days like this on his vacation, all of them so intense that he was left with a sheen of pink on his shoulders and a destroyed sense of the word ‘sunset’. Here, the sun was always _set;_ set in its ways, even as it rose. It knew exactly what it wanted to do, who it wanted to burn, whose hands it wanted to make sticky with drying peach juice as they sat with their legs dangling over a short, rocky cliff in the late Grecian afternoon.

The peach was big. Much bigger than the dry, meagre slices he had been served in a bowl with a dessert fork in Louisiana three months ago. Much bigger than the slimy, canned slices that he would buy in the general store run by the old Chinese woman opposite his apartment in New York. It was a real peach, a proper Mediterranean peach, soft and supple and almost sensual in the way it oozed, the way it popped gently when his teeth split the skin and he slurped up another bite.

He was shirtless on the rocks, his olive skin glistening with sweat and salt, bronzing ever darker in the heat that he had been luxuriating in for the past week. The Rose’s villa was a smooth, white thing, much smaller than their other houses but still perfect. And here, on this vacation, marked the longest time that David had been unattached and single since he turned nineteen. To lie alone on the golden chaise lounge by the glassless window, eating grapes and sighing in time with the translucent silk curtains that caressed his face in the breeze…the peace it gave him was indescribable.

There was a sound behind him. Bare feet slapping on the stones, a quick hand reaching out and coming down flat on a rock for balance. David shuffled himself up into a better sitting position and turned around.

A boy was stood on an angle, watching him with a ghost of wonder on his face. He couldn’t have been any more than thirteen years old. He looked like David, vaguely. He looked like him in the way David had come to recognize certain people and knew there was unconditional solidarity to be found there. Especially here. Especially now.

“Ebraico?” The boy said, in Italian.

David unravelled inside with warmth and relief. He nodded his head. “Yes. Jewish.”

The boy smiled. “And British?”

“Canadian,” David said.

The boy repeated the word, mouthing it gently through barely opening lips. With surer footing he approached David and sat down beside him.

“Leone,” the boy said, and he stuck out his hand. David showed him his sticky one and shrugged. The boy laughed, waving his hand away. David nodded his head in greeting.

“David.”

“And you live here now?”

“No,” David said, “I’m here for a vacation.”

Leone scoffed. “You vacation at a strange time. You must be careful.”

“I know,” David said. What was it that his father had said in his most recent telegram? _This is getting serious now, David. You need to stop treating the world like a goddamn minefield to dance around._

And he wished, by God, he _wished_ he could show his father how much there was still to see, how much would go untouched if David did not touch it now, now, now. There were areas of the world he would no longer touch. London had been Blitzed to shreds, and Paris was a no-go. The entirety of the Balkans was a literal minefield, so David supposed his father’s words had some stock to them, after all. But the air was still sweet and drinkable in so many parts of the world, and to someone like David, who had far too much money and far too much to do with it, the concept of a _world_ war was impossible to justify. Not when the sea looked like this.

He supposed, if he had sat down with his father those three years ago and told him that he was going to keep travelling the world right after he’d announced that he wasn’t going to enlist, that Johnny Rose would do anything but understand. Perhaps David was young, and his logic was still flighty and cringeworthy, but there was a gentle poetry to this way of life, shifting his shoulders round the edges of danger just as comfortably as Alexis was nosediving into it, that he wanted to hold close to his chest for as long as possible. _Let me be young,_ he wanted to say, to no one in particular. _God, please, let me be young and alone, in the company of the sea and of peaches._

“I live here,” the boy said, and there was a tinge of regret in his voice, “forever now. My mother comes from Sicily some years ago, and she takes off her tichel, she never liked to wear it anyway, and she marries my stepfather.”

David looked out at the sea again. Johnny was wrong. It felt safe, all this expanse. He felt safe. He took another bite of peach, and this time after the bite he let the juice run right down his chin, down his wrists. “And do you get on well with your stepfather?” David said, once he had finished chewing.

Leone shrugged. “He gets on well with the Nazis,” he said. Through his thick accent, the word was almost indistinguishable. But whether Nazis or Nazziss, David knew what he meant. He knew the word that had been making his stomach roll since 1936.

“Chazak u'varuch,” David said. And an odd sound his voice made, too; almost a whisper, almost a yell. It broke his voice and a little bit of his heart.

Leone smiled gently. The sun dipped lower, and David felt it. The boy felt it too, for he shivered and pulled himself upright.

“I should go home now,” he said. “Goodbye, David.” He made to walk away and then he stopped, turning back around and tilting his head at David curiously. “I hope you find your way back home one day.”

David felt his breath catch in his throat. Leone was so young, but there was so much meaning in what he said, so much deep, aching _meaning_ that David’s eyes filmed over with tears. He said it like he knew him, and knew the world, far better than a boy of his age should have done. Perhaps he was wealthy. Perhaps he had an older brother, too.

“Me too,” David breathed.

Once he was gone, David sat back on the heels of his hands and finished his peach. What Leone had said was still burrowing its way down inside him. David could feel it, nosing through the soil and earth of him like a rabbit. Perhaps when he got back to the villa, when he returned to the desperate telegrams from his parents and telephone calls from Sebastien that would eventually seduce him back to New York, the words would have settled.

Every bit of him was so sticky with juice. His chin, his hands, and his chest were all dripping with the sweet, full nectar of the beautiful fruit, glittering like the water beneath him, and there was only one thing for it. He took one last, long look at the sun and he jumped in the sea.

* * *

_1952_

* * *

That safety, that home, was something David had been chasing for much longer than he cared to admit, and even here in Schitt’s Creek, where the sun was fresh and people were _nice,_ Leone’s words still tugged at him. He would be ten years older now. He hoped Leone had stayed safe. He hoped that Leone had not discarded his religion out of fear like his mother.

David thought he had it sometimes. When he could smell the fig and plum of Twyla’s Christmas pudding through the vents of the diner, or when his parents celebrated their anniversary in one of the joyous, humbly beautiful ways they had learned how to accommodate for, home crept in like heat under the door, warmed the cracks of him left cold and gaping by a former life unlived. But something was missing. Something vital, something he had never seen or heard and felt like he never would, an absence so subtle yet so clear that he felt like he was chasing an unknown taste around his mouth every single day. Like a half-forgotten word was sitting on the tip of his tongue and he _knew_ that he knew it, but it wouldn’t come out. He would never admit it, not even to Stevie, the strange loneliness he felt. He told himself it was a leftover pre-1949 scrap. He also told himself that it wasn’t.

After returning from his walk and waiting for the rest of the Roses to wake up, David had gone to breakfast at the Café and resigned himself to a rather boring morning of sitting inside and signing off papers and documents for the new store. After his first tour of the lot the other day with Ray, David had downsized the plan from three stories to two, and with it a lot of his ideas for a big department store had started to wobble at the edges. Still, he clung onto it, that hard-nosed, avant garde dream, and after he had signed the last document he pored over the sketches of the store he’d drawn and rubbed out and drawn again, snacking on tea and potato chips as Doris Day crooned on the radio.

_“I love you, a bushel and a peck, you bet your pretty neck I do…”_

“A-doodle-oodle-loo,” Alexis sang along under her breath, wiggling her pencil over her latest essay. “They’re going to make a picture of this in a few seasons’ time, you know.”

“Another picture of a Broadway musical? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It’s just incorrect. It never works the way they want it to.”

“What does that matter? It’s just some fun. When I spent that weekend with Marlon in Manhattan, he said he would love to play Sky Masterson one day. I hope he does.”

“Al- _exis_ , you’re not harping on again about that twisted dandy of a man Brando again, are you?” Moira strode through the open doors that connected their rooms, glaring at Alexis with a pointed gaze. “I shall never forget how he sniffed down his nose at the rest of the cast at The Barrymore.”

“Um, remind us who you played again, Mother? The nurse’s understudy?”

Moira tutted at Alexis and turned her back to her. “David, I should like to believe that one out of my two progenies is not remiss in listening to me today,” she said. “I received word from Jocelyn at choir practice that someone has signed on to set to help you ready your little retail establishment for the wider public.”

That made David perk up a bit, but only a bit. It was probably Ronnie. But if it was Ronnie, then why didn’t Ronnie say so herself? She was in the choir too.

“Okay,” David said slowly, “I mean, if you’re wondering if I have any of Ronnie’s details, I don’t –”

“Perish the thought, dear. Ronnie is growing more and more reluctant to take on more favors than her sciatica allows these days. It’s a young man helping you. A lodger residing with Mr. Butani.”

David’s gut kicked out at the wall of muscle in front of it. “Patrick Brewer?”

“That was it!” Moira said, snapping her fingers. “The little Marine boy. See? Your venture is not such an avalanche of unstoppable disaster after all.”

“I don’t think I ever said that –”

“Until suppertime, _mon primogeniture!”_

And Moira left, accidentally sweeping Alexis’ pencils and paper from the table with her ridiculously long sleeves as she went. Alexis huffed and puffed about David being the favorite, but he was only half-listening.

Patrick was going to be working beside him, and _with_ him, presumably until the store was complete.

He stewed for a moment in the defensiveness on Patrick’s behalf that had started to burgeon inside him ever since Moira had called him the ‘little Marine boy’, which David knew was entirely reductive of what Patrick had seen and what he had done, if their very first encounter was anything to go by. Then, without warning, the defensiveness buckled and gave way to fierce protectiveness. The kind, a little voice in his head told him, he usually reserved for Alexis and Stevie. The kind he _only_ reserved for Alexis and Stevie.

David got up and went for a walk just for something to do. Tomorrow was when he had planned to go back into the store to have a look around by himself. He presumed, now, that Patrick would be joining him, doing whatever it was David wanted him to in a biddable, obedient way that David already knew would annoy him.

That was not the person he wanted Patrick to be. It was not the person that Patrick _was,_ though David had no idea how he knew that. There was something else there, something that filled David so deeply with intrigue that it felt like a calling from God to be near him, to work out the puzzle of him. Not so much to pick him apart or unfold him, but to dust off the sand of the beaches Patrick had been on like an archaeologist and pull out the treasure beneath. The treasure he knew was there.

The next morning, he went for yet another walk, just to put his feet to work lest they shot off to Ray’s without him. He didn’t see Patrick this time.

He did see him, however, through the windows of the lot, two hours later.

Patrick was stood inside with his back to the front door of the store, a brown duffle bag at his feet, staring up at the empty walls like he was staring at something else. Something much grander than the curls of wallpaper on the floor and the pockmarked wall, left gaping from the previous occupation of bolts and nails. The shelves that had once balanced on those same bolts were chopped up in corners on the floor.

“You’re early.”

David regretted it as soon as he had said it. Patrick turned around, and for a heartbreaking second, David saw his hands fly up to his waist, held in the imitation of a gun. David held his palms out in placation as he walked in.

“Morning,” Patrick said quietly, like he was trying to reset himself. To put back to bed the old version of himself and bring this new one out of its hole. David could almost hear the thoughts rattling.

“So…what do you think?” David asked. “Of the store.”

Unexpectedly, Patrick’s brow creased in uncertainty, and David knew he was about to lie.

“It’s…different,” he said.

“Code for ‘a terrible idea’, right?”

Patrick cleared his throat. “I, um. I wouldn’t say terrible, it’s just. Big.”

“What, this room, or all the lots put together?”

“No, this room is fine, it’s just…if it was _just_ this room…” Patrick trailed off, shaking his head. “Nah. If there’s anything you want me to get on with, I’ll start.”

David was almost about to argue that Patrick should keep talking – given their unexpected interaction yesterday morning, Patrick clearly had strong opinions on construction – but let it be. For the next half hour, David awkwardly directed Patrick around the room, clearing up the wood and yanking the other nails from the wall with a tool, feeling entirely wrong that he wasn’t helping. 

That said, he had no complaints from where he was standing. Patrick had shed the fleeced jacket he arrived in within ten minutes of starting his work, and the shirt he wore beneath clung to him in a way that made David think he must have purchased it long before he enlisted. Back when he wasn’t so…so – what was it? Bulky. _Strong._ He had more muscles in his back than he had seen on anyone, even the models he knew in the city who had heads full of sawdust that used to slick and bronze every hint of firmness on their bodies so that they _looked_ especially muscular, but this. This was _real_ muscle. Hard-earned brawn.

Then came the crates, and David thought he might die to look at Patrick much longer.

There wasn’t much conversation in between the giving of instructions and small talk about the weather, but they had had a long communication over the transportation of several large, heavy crates from one lot to another. And the sun that they had been placidly discussing began to break through the clouds, the hottest day of the year so far, and so Patrick shed his shirt as well.

And there was something that he reminded David of, something he couldn’t put a finger on. Part of him didn’t want to, because his brain threw out a few wild thoughts that morning about how nothing on earth was comparable to the expanses of taut, sweat-slick skin and the roll of his muscles in his shoulders and arms, but then he shifted to the right a little so that the sun caught his skin and David realized. Patrick looked like the peach he had eaten in Corfu.

As Patrick cleared out the last crate and put it in the main lot, David felt like his skin was fluttering. It surprised him, and left him feeling almost ashamed. Until yesterday morning, Patrick had merely intrigued him. He hadn’t had any plans to think of him in any other way. But, David harshly reminded himself, thinking about motels and Eli, life didn’t have plans. So there was nothing for anyone else to plan around.

So David followed Patrick back into the store, and he quietly let himself go.

“David?”

“Hm?”

“I was askin’ what you might do with the crates.”

“O-oh. I…you know, I thought I’d just –”

David properly looked at the crates for the first time, and found to his surprise that there was something about the way Patrick had put them down that just worked.

“Actually…I think they might actually work as counters,” David said, “for the – the products.” His mind shifted its way back into its usual creative coherence, and he thought about the drawings upon drawings he had done of this room in many hypothetical states.

“Only I have no idea how to get them looking like I’d want,” David said, walking around the crates and appraising them from different angles. “Some are too small, some too big, some just stick out all wrong.”

Patrick titled his head. “If you’re looking to alter them, I have something that might help.”

Patrick reached into his bag and pulled out a battered brown book. The cover looked one yank away from destruction and the pages were as cracked and yellow as a lifelong smoker’s teeth. He held it out oddly, in a way that looked like he was trying to keep it close to his person at the same time as offering it to David. His elbow was crooked awkwardly, endearingly, and he had a sheepish look in his eyes.

David took the book as carefully as he could. The inner front hinge was cracked and gaping with a wobble. The front of it was grooved shallowly with the long since faded title: ‘Workshop Receipts, For the Use of Mechanics, Manufacturers and Scientific Amateurs, by Ernest Spon’. David supposed it must have been a fine book in its earliest days, the title perhaps buffed in bronze, the now delicate spine as thick and sturdy as the professional hands that held it.

“It’s, uh, a worker’s manual,” Patrick said. “My grandpop gave it to me when I was fourteen.”

David smiled and lightly tapped the book into his palm twice. “This is handy. Looks like you’ve read it a fair bit, too.”

“It’s not the only book I have,” Patrick said quickly. “I read a lot. More than most people, really.”

“It’s alright, I didn’t mean to offend,” David placated.

Patrick shrugged. Everything he did seemed so soft, so submissive. Every movement he made and every interaction was played out as though he were proving himself to David, justifying his existence and apologizing for his very being there, and David had the sudden and absurd urge to wrap him up in something. “I just thought I’d mention in case you thought I was…I don’t know.”

David felt that Patrick was eager to change the subject, but if he was being honest there was hardly much more to talk about at the moment, unless he was possessed to bring up the dreadful dinner party. And he was not. David opened the book carefully and leafed through some random pages.

 _“The large trepan, Figs. 128 to 130, weighs 16 1_ ⁄ _2 tons, is forged in one solid piece, and has twenty-eight teeth. A projection of iron fits loosely into the hole made by the small trepan, acting as a guide for the tool…”_

“What other books do you have?” David said. “What are your favourites?”

“I like poetry and fantasy. Thackeray,” Patrick said. “The Rose and the Ring is one I’ve read over and over. Byron, as well.”

“I like Byron too,” David said. He wasn’t sure why, but he breathed the words as though they were a confession. As though they meant more. He supposed they did, in a way. Back in New York, in his circle of speakeasies and gentleman’s clubs, liking Byron was a question asked of a man with a wink and a nod to the back of the room. A character assessment that was almost always correct.

“This is helpful. But I think I’ll leave the manual sides of the business to you. And…” David considered for a moment, thinking about the way Patrick had grilled him about the business the other day. “If you’d be willing, I might need some extra help with the, um, business-y bits as well.”

“Business-y bits,” Patrick repeated. And he smirked. “Yeah, I think you need a lot of help, David.”

“Okay, okay.” David waved him off with his hand, masking his secret amusement and relief with a quick change of the subject. “Are you hungry? I can run by the diner if you like and get you a bacon sandwich. Twyla doesn’t mind when you take orders away.”

“No, not hungry at all, thank you,” Patrick said, very unconvincingly. David considered letting it slide until Patrick’s stomach gave a huge rumble.

David tried not to laugh, but then they caught each other’s eye and couldn’t help it anyway. There was something mutual there, something safe; David felt like he had said a hundred things on the spot, all the _don’t lie to me_ and _you ain’t slick, Brewer_ that he might have said if he knew him better. And something told him that Patrick had heard him.

David wasn’t quite ready to admit how much he had wanted to see Patrick eat again after the other night, for the strange desire for it confused him as well. Even more so when the sandwich arrived and Patrick devoured it like the malnourished man he was, barely stopping for breath between big, gratifying bites. He showed no shame. David wagered he’d eaten enough meals like this around men to barely give it a second thought. He watched on, amused, and – would he say this was _doing it for him,_ as Stevie would word it in her crass way? No. Not quite. But…he was watching Patrick nourish himself. Fill himself up. And there was something about the way he was slurping the tomato juice that was running down his fingers and _okay,_ maybe it was doing it for him a little bit.

“You know, we were talking about business things before,” Patrick started when he finished the sandwich, “and I think I know a couple things that might help. There are grants for local businesses that you can apply for and I…suppose I’d be happy to assist with those applications.”

“Oh, I don’t want to put you to the trouble if –” _You’d see a hell of a lot more of him –_ “if it’s…not too much trouble. I mean. That’s very generous of you. Thank you.”

The corner of Patrick’s mouth quirked. “If I can find a plain copy of a similar grant in Ray’s papers tonight, I’ll send it over for you to look over.”

And sure enough, when David returned home that night, there was an envelope addressed to him at the reception desk of the motel. Stevie must have gone home a while ago, otherwise she would be stood at his door, badgering him until he opened the letter and read it out loud to her, like she did with all his letters. David looked over it, and that strange fluttering under his skin returned.

He stood in the middle of his room, empty and quiet since Alexis had gone to the drive-in at Elmdale with Ted, and he sighed. It had…certainly been a day, that was for sure. His own mind had kept running off with him, interpreting everything wrong, forcing completely unbidden thoughts about Patrick into places he didn’t necessarily want them to be. He was so quiet, Patrick, and so vulnerable, but today had been…different. He’d talked, properly talked to David, and even made a joke at David’s expense about him needing help. Even so, he felt guilty thinking about him in the way he had. There were three sides of him, battling against each other: the side that saw Patrick as something rare, something precious, the side that felt like those thoughts were violating Patrick in some way, and the side that appreciated those eyes and those muscles for what they were.

David flexed his fingers and swallowed. He needed to take his mind off it all. He pulled up a writing pad and uncapped his pen, then wrote out two letters to two addresses:

_“Dear Patrick,_

_Thank you for sending over the copy of the grant. I’m really pleased that there’s less thumb-twiddling in an empty room ahead of ~~us~~ me, and more decorating and building relationships with contractors! _

_And thank you as well for helping me with the manual work. You’re awfully helpful to have around._

_Until I see you again (likely in a town this size…!),_

_David.”_

It wasn’t quite enough to calm him down. He felt his pants tightening. He wrote the second:

_“Rt. Hon. Stephanie Budd, Esq.,_

_I write bearing news. Quiet, sleepy Patrick was IN my store. He did work for me. Of his own volition. Not quite as sleepy today, might I add. He carried crates for me. And what a wonderful job he did. Rather, those muscles in his back did a wonderful job…he is short, but strong. I never saw a nicer back, not even Jake’s. I wish you could have been there. Or rather maybe not. For TWO reasons:_

  * _The first being that I quite like having that gorgeous image all to myself, thank you very much._
  * _The second being that I worked my tongue in knots trying to speak to him and you will have surely made fun of me._



_In conclusion: No sleepy boy for you. Also, I’d like you to give me back the hat you stole because it cost me twelve dollars._

_Warmest regards,_

_You-know-who”._

Hurriedly, without thinking, David packaged the letters, put on two stamps and shoved them through the letterbox outside. And it still wasn’t enough. He came back inside, pressing himself flat against the door.

_Short breaths. The calming ones. One, two –_

“Fuck it,” David said, and he unbuckled his pants.

****

The previous day had been a Saturday, so David knew his letters wouldn’t be delivered for at least another twenty-four hours. But he still saw Patrick the next day, and the routine was rather the same, except this time it ended with Patrick and David sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of Patrick’s copy of Workshop Receipts, poring over the diagrams about measuring crates and sanding crates down and doing all sorts of things to crates that flew over David’s head. It made little sense to him, little at all. It was like another language, and as David thumbed the pages in his hands he wondered how anyone could ever call this labor unskilled.

“Right, I give in,” David declared, standing up. Patrick watched David until he was all the way up, brushing off his sweater. It was a gray, knitted, fair isle patterned one Alexis had bought for him while she was hiding out in Fair Isle itself, and it was probably the least glamorous sweater he owned. Though, he admitted, the most comfortable.

“Oh, so you’re just gonna leave me here on the floor?” Patrick said, and David looked down to find the floor sparkling brighter than the chandelier crystals in the main dining hall of the Ritz. And it was Patrick’s eyes that were doing that, and David almost had to look away because it had been a while since he’d laid eyes on something so decadent, and he thought the richness of it might upset his stomach. There was a glint of mischief there, a hint of playfulness.

_Oh, he’s telling a joke. It’s gorgeous._

“I’ll make it up to you,” David said, not entirely sure what he was trying to say or why. “You’ve done a lot for me these past two days.”

“Not nearly enough,” Patrick muttered, pointing down at the book. “There’s so much left to do.”

David shook his head, fighting a desperate urge to take Patrick’s hands and pull him up and show him that the last thing he wanted to do was leave him there on the floor. “It can wait,” he said. “Look, the sun is setting. If you’re free, do you want to have dinner with me? Not – not _at_ mine, you know I live in a motel, but…there is somewhere we can go.”

Patrick’s eyes flicked down to the book. He took a breath, closed it carefully, then stood up slowly until he was face-to-face with David.

“I’d like that,” he said.

That David had his own key to Stevie’s apartment was a blessing he never knew he would feel so keenly until this moment. It had been convenient when they were still in the throes of their regrettable affair, and it had been a favor for which Stevie expected payment when he had taken Jake back here one night when the motel was full and he was worried he was going to lose Jake’s attention if he didn’t see to him now. Of course, he hadn’t known back then the only fundamental truth of that strange, breezy man’s character: you never really had Jake’s attention, except when you did, which was always.

He remembered how he had felt then, desperate and nervous, rutting the key against the slit and missing several times in a frenzied attempt to get the door opened. And though David had physically led Jake to the apartment, though he had sent Jake no less than four notes confirming and double checking the time and place of their meeting, Jake was always the one in charge, always the one in the lead.

And Jake was not a bad person, David knew that. He just wasn’t...this.

If he wanted, David could have jammed the key through the door with shaking hands, kicked it from its slightly rotted wooden frame in his desperation to be in this room – and what was more, be in this room _alone,_ with Patrick. But he didn’t. He didn’t rush, he went slowly. What held him back was the very thing that made him want to speed off faster than a bullet from a gun. Patrick was too…too…

David turned to him the second he slowly slotted the key into the door, pinching the key tightly and making sure to feel every notch that the key disturbed. Patrick was looking at his feet, hands in his pockets, patient and quiet. He looked up at David and David smiled. He turned the key to the right and let the door swing open, pulling back to offer Patrick entry into the apartment first.

Patrick entered slowly, looking around, shading in another area of this town that had previously been in black and white at the edges of the view from his bedroom window.

“Does Stevie let you in like this all the time?” he said. David caught everything he hadn’t said as well. He was stuck between which one to answer; the _does Stevie let you in like this all the time_ or the _how often do you spend the night at Stevie’s._

“Only when she’s off trotting in the woods with her weird boyfriend,” David said, answering both at the same time.

Patrick gave him that funny half-frown smile again. “Sounds cold.”

“Mm. It does.”

And that was the last thing David wanted Patrick to be, so he turned up the radiator and went into the kitchen.

Stevie had said he could use anything in her cupboards, anything at all, if he hadn’t been made hopeless in the kitchen from years of pampering and then subsequent years of poverty. He opened the root vegetable basket down by the side of the kitchen counter and fished out some short, dry carrots and a large potato. There was a recipe that Adelina used to make him when he would come in from school dragging his feet. There wasn’t much more to it than a simple soup, smooth and thick and sweet, and David had never wanted it any other way. It was warming and humble and just the faintest bit spicy, a touch of Adelina’s half-Adeni heritage that she introduced David to as though he were her own son. He fiddled with the wrappers of cayenne pepper and dried coriander in Stevie’s cupboard, sniffing them in turn to find the one most suited to an accurate mock-up of his favorite childhood meal. She had an old pot of generic spice mix right at the back with about an inch of powder left in it. It had hardened into a lump that David would have to crumble up, but it was the most adjacent scent of them all. It would have to do.

In the living room, Patrick was picking at the magazines on the shelf and occasionally turning his gaze to the television as though he expected it to turn on unbidden, or that David would come in and do it for him.

David swallowed the unexplained nervousness that was starting to chug up his throat and called, “You need to give the box a few good slaps if you turn it on. And turn the wire a little towards the window.”

Patrick gave no indication that he had heard David, other than that he did exactly what David had suggested. He managed to switch on the television in record time, much faster than David ever managed to do it, with his nimble fingers and mind that was still firmly wired to wordless obedience.

David set the water to boil, adding a bouillon cube when small bubbles started to fizz at the surface like champagne. Then he set to work peeling and chopping the carrots and potatoes, turning around to watch Patrick far more often than was probably necessary to set the man at ease. It was a little earlier than David and Stevie’s usual weekday watching sessions, meaning _Your Hit Parade_ wasn’t yet on and there was no chewy, upbeat pop or aching, soulful jazz to drown out and gulp up the heavy, awkward spaces where silence had grown between them.

_“Last week, marking the 65 th anniversary since its composition, pianist Claudio Arrau performed the first of Erik Satie’s three Gymnopédies at the Blackheath Concert Hall in London…”_

David tuned into the new noise coming from the box, and _God._ Of course it was something like this. Of _course_ it was some stupidly melancholy and profound piece of classical music, the kind that had imbued, and was going to imbue, every successive generation and their dogs with a different kind of associative hurt. Classical solo piano had that strange power. The notes were always the same, and no one was ever hearing anything different, except that they _were,_ in that vital and selfish way that people tend to make everything about themselves. It wasn’t made to be listened to, this kind of music. It was meant to be lived in. People liked to play around with music, stretch it over the lumps and bumps of their lives like a pillowcase. David had always found it so fascinating that the same song that made people bob their heads placidly could make others break down in tears and make others still stare off into the distance for hours, the song a whisper in their ear reminding them of their darkest moments.

David wondered where Patrick had been when he heard this piece for the first time. Or perhaps right here, in Stevie’s damp, boxy apartment, he was hearing it for the first time, and all the threadbare carpets and gently bubbling soup and the sound of David’s feet on the tiles were the memories that would draw a tear from his eighty-year-old eye, when his granddaughter or great-granddaughter played the song for him by his bedside.

David knew where he had been. He was eleven years old when he heard Gymnopédie for the first time, crouching in his father’s private study where the best gramophone lived. He clipped the phonograph disc into the wooden box with a wobbling snap that was terrifying for a moment, thinking he’d shattered the thing, and pressed the needle down. He lay flat on his stomach in the study, getting dust on his jacket and watching the spiral grooves turn round and round until the single, flowing line of quarter notes, raising and lowering like ocean waves, played _douloureux, tristement, gravement_ , smelled like the books on his father’s desk and moved to the beat of Moira’s clipping heels in the background as she fled round the upper floor of the mansion, looking for David.

“I do like that piece,” she had said when she found him, startling David but simultaneously putting him at ease that he wasn’t in any trouble for sneaking around. “Your father and I saw Satie himself play it at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.”

Moira had said it as though she expected David to be impressed, and start hearing the song as though _he_ had worn a sparkling blue evening dress and paid ten dollars for a ticket to see the composer. No, those were his mother’s memories. He had been making his own, right there on the floor, just as Patrick was between the ticking of Stevie’s clock and the comforting, papery smell of matte magazine pages.

It didn’t take long to make the soup. Many a day and night at Adelina’s side had taught him each stir of the spoon, the intervals in which he had to add the spices. It was just about the only meal he could make that would always go off without a hitch. In the last few minutes, he popped two slices of toast in the oven, and looked for something he could use to – ah. Cauliflower leaves. And garlic powder. This was perfect.

He crumbled the bread up into little pieces and shredded the leaves, then tossed it all in the powder and sprinkled it on top of the two full bowls he’d gently scooped out moments before. He was so giddy about the whole thing by the time he delivered the bowls to the table that he almost dropped them, but he managed to successfully place Patrick’s bowl in front of him, albeit with a stuttered and stupid “here you go, bon appetit”.

And there was one thing David hadn’t known he wanted, until it arrived and filled him with so much warmth that he felt feverish. They ate in near silence. David didn’t hear himself try to stumble his way through some personal questions that might frighten Patrick off, and Patrick didn’t fill the silence that scared him so much with bland ministrations about the store or the food. He ate much slower than he had at Ray’s, much less like he had a 20-minute window in which to eat, and more like he was appreciating the end-of-workday thanks that David was giving him. On the television, Claudio Arrau had moved on from Satie and was caressing his way through a slow, sleepy Debussy, and David was so glad it was “Reverie” and not “Clair de Lune”, because boy, was “Clair de Lune” overplayed.

Debussy was one of David’s favorites. He was rich and dreamy, lush and addictive. He said nothing, and Patrick said nothing, and they let the music seep into their bones, sink into the soup. David had not heard _Reverie_ as much as the other pieces. Perhaps it would always taste of carrots from now on. Perhaps the seventh suspensions would always be interrupted by the clink of Patrick’s spoon.

He hoped so.

Patrick finished eating around the same time as the music ended, and sat back with the smallest contented sigh.

“Well, David, I have to hand it to you,” he said, “that might be the best damn soup I’ve ever eaten.”

David smirked. “Don’t thank me, thank Adelina.”

“S’that your mother?”

“Almost.”

Patrick looked at him oddly, and David assumed he was letting things go unsaid, letting the non-words settle just as David had. Both of them were scored thick with little scars, little hurts that blemished the past decade with things that had become an unfortunate part of them.

“I heard about your father. In the papers, back then. I suppose it’s…I suppose it’s a lot to get used to.”

David swallowed and nodded. He took Patrick’s bowl and placed it gently on top of his, lining the spoons up together in the top bowl. He sometimes left his washing up when he crashed Stevie’s apartment, but this was more than some brief respite away from Alexis. The least he could do was clean her dishes.

“And I’m always hearing about…you know, over there,” David tested, and breathed a silent sigh of relief when Patrick didn’t cringe or go rigid. “And I suppose that’s a lot to get used to as well.”

Patrick tightened his lips and nodded. He looked around, looked out the steadily darkening window, and David knew his stare was going way beyond the trees visible from Stevie’s apartment. “In a way, it’s like we’re both starting something new.”

And David’s chest did a strange thing, then. If he were to describe it, it would probably land somewhere between how he had felt the first time Sebastien had kissed him and the time his parents had told him they loved him at their anniversary party in Mutt’s barn last year. And, laced around the edges of it, was something akin to the time he had eaten a banana cream cake in Vietnam so good that he had cried.

He washed up quickly, and saw Patrick watching him with curious intent, as though he had never seen someone wash up before.

“I’ll leave them for Stevie to dry,” David said. “She might do me a lot of favors, but she owes me a hell of a lot as well.”

He had said it to make Patrick laugh, to put him at ease, and was relieved to see it had done the trick. David opened the door and let Patrick out first, the same way he had let him in.

With the pace they kept, it took them a while – but not nearly long enough – to walk back to Ray’s. Patrick looked a little awkward as he approached it, turning towards David then gesturing to the house as if to say “well, this is me”, even though David already knew.

They stood in front of each other for a moment and David wanted to reach out, wanted desperately to do something else for him. He was struck by an overwhelming urge to give him the world, to package it up and lay it at Patrick Brewer’s feet, to give back and give _back_ to someone who looked like they had spent far too much time giving. But if all David could give him for now was soup, then it would have to do.

There was a smudge of it on Patrick’s lip. David muttered the smallest, smallest warning – no more than a “You’ve got a little” – before he reached out with his thumb and swiped it away. Patrick flinched backwards before he realised what David was doing, and then his face broke out something soft and thankful.

“Thanks,” he said. “And thanks for dinner tonight. Let me know when I need to settle the bill before you start repossessing my stuff.”

Another joke. He was getting good at this. David smiled, hoping it landed in the way he wanted it to through the dark evening light, and took a reluctant step back.

“Goodnight, Patrick,” he said quietly.

Patrick took a hold of the door handle and clicked it open. “Goodnight, David.”

And when he was gone, and the door was gently closed, David raised his thumb to his mouth, sucked off the soup, then turned and made the short journey home, the pearls in his shoes clicking as they always did on the cold stone pavement.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading. I'd love to hear your thoughts! Come yell at me on [Tumblr](https://fairmanor.tumblr.com/), if you want.


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